One Giant Mystery

A dicynodont

The fossilised skull fragments of a giant clumsy terrestrial plant-eating creature from the Cretaceous period suggest that while dinosaurs ruled most of the Earth at the time, they did not rule Queensland.

Fossils suggesting dinosaurs did not rule Queensland in the Cretaceous period have raised intense scientific interest.

This discovery by a University of Queensland palaeontologist came almost 90 years after the fossil fragments from a dicynodont skull were found at Hughenden in the west of the State.

The dicynodont had a body resembling a hippopotamus, a beak resembling a turtle and tusks like a walrus.

Associate Professor Tony Thulborn from the School of Life Sciences said his research showed the dicynodont survived in Queensland well into the Cretaceous age of the dinosaurs.

Dr Thulborn and his wife Dr Susan Turner, an honorary research associate at the Queensland Museum, found dicynodont fossils in the Cretaceous rocks of Queensland were only 105 million years old.

Their discovery contradicts the long-held belief that dicynodonts declined to extinction in the late Triassic period around 220 million years ago.

"We could say dinosaurs didn't rule the Earth. They ruled most of it but not Queensland," Dr Thulborn said.

"In most parts of the world every large land animal of Jurassic and Cretaceous age was a dinosaur. The only exception was Queensland where some of the big land animals weren't dinosaurs but dicynodonts."

Dicynodonts were mammal-like reptiles believed to have dominated the Earth before the rise of the dinosaurs. However Drs Thulborn and Turner have argued that dicynodonts existed well into the age of the dinosaurs.

Their research was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences in March.

The discovery was made after re-analysing fragments of a skull found in Hughenden in Queensland in 1914.

The six pieces of fossil bone from the left facial region had been studied in 1915 by the then Assistant Director of the Queensland Museum Heber Albert Longman who noted the resemblance to the dicynodonts.

As the fragments were believed to have been too recent in age to be a dicynodont, they went back into the museum collection in 1915 where they remained until 2001.

The discovery more than doubles the known duration of dicynodont history and leaves a large part unrepresented in the fossil record.

"For us poking around in the Cretaceous, it's astonishing to find a dicynodont ? a creature that was supposed to have been extinct 110 million years earlier," Dr Thulborn said.

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