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Meet Wade, A Gigantic Australian Dinosaur

Artist’s rendition of Savannasaurus from the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History

Back in 2005, David Elliott was guiding a mob of sheep across central Queensland, Australia, when he spotted two fossilized bone fragments. Elliott took his wife Judy to the spot, showing her what he believed to be parts of a meat-eating dinosaur’s ancient remains.

Judy Elliott realized that the bones fit together, and it turned out the bones made up a massive toe. The Elliotts had stumbled onto an undiscovered species of Australian dinosaur: a gigantic, four-legged animal that had stood 40 to 50 feet long – roughly the same length as an 18-wheeler truck. The couple named the dinosaur Wade, after a friend and fellow paleontologist.

David had co-founded the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, and with the help of the Queensland Museum, both he and his wife began a difficult dig at the Winton Formation. The dinosaur bones were buried in rocks, which the paleontologists had to crack using jackhammers. The team removed 17 pallets of rocks from the site, which dated back to the Late Cretaceous period, the Washington Post reports.

It took nine years for museum staff, scientists and volunteers to chip away at the hard stone with pneumatic, tungsten-tipped tools that would not damage any dinosaur bones.

As the dig continued, it became clear that they were dealing with a type of long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur called a sauropod, specifically a titanosaur.

Wade had several distinctive features unique to it, like hips of an unusual size. Stephen Poropat, an expert on sauropods at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, said, “Early on, it became clear the pelvis was very different than had been found in any other sauropod in the world.” Wade had a girth of five feet, making it a “wide-gauge animal.”

It was also a chubby dinosaur, with an extremely large belly. Scientists believe this was because of bacteria that fermented vegetation, similar to how cows and gazelles digest their food.

In a new paper written by the Elliotts, Poropat and colleagues, Wade finally has an official name: Savannasaurus elliottorum. In it, the scientists also report on a similar titanosaur named Diamantinasaurus, which was also found at the Winton Formation in 2009.

Both kinds of dinosaurs seem to have co-existed 98 million to 95 million years ago. Poropat explained that bones from various sauropod species across South America and Asia show that the creatures lived within the same area.

The scientists hypothesize that an ancestor of Savannasaurus and Diamantinasaurus likely made its way across Antarctica to Australia, back when Australia was firmly anchored to the southernmost continent.

Fossils of both species are currently on display at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum.

 

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