The first known dinosaur herd in Australia was discovered hidden in glittering fossils

The dinosaur record in Australia is one of the least understood, with only a handful of species discovered in the last hundred years. But a newly identified person has been in our possession for decades without our knowledge.

A strange collection of un-studied bones exhibited at Australia's oldest museum for years has turned out to be an entirely new dinosaur species – and the first evidence of a herd of dinosaurs in the country, including the world's most complete opalised dinosaur skeleton.

"This is unheard of in Australia," said lead author Phil Bell The Smithsonian. "The whole collection contained about sixty bones, which is a remarkable number for an Australian dinosaur."

Preserved in an opal, the glittering remains were first discovered in 1984 by Australian miner Bob Foster, who worked in a remote town and a giant fossil site called Lightning Ridge.

Frustrated by the number of dinosaur bones he had found (after all, his livelihood was based on opals), Foster made a long trip to the Australian Museum in Sydney, more than half a mile away. .

"I was a little tired," he says The New York Times. "I had carried these suitcases on the train, on the bus and on the stairs, and I opened them and threw the bones on the table, plunged to catch them before landing on the floor."

(Robert A Smith / Australian Opal Center)

And then, for some inexplicable reason, the largest collection of opalised dinosaur fossils has ever been studied. When Foster saw some exhibited in an opal shop in Sydney many years later, he took back everything he could and gave everything to the Australian Opal Center in 2015.

It is here that the first formal study really began. After years of painstaking research, using a CT scanner instead of a physical extraction, researchers at the University of New England in Armidale have discovered traces of an entirely unknown dinosaur species called Fostoria dhimbangunmal, named for his discoverer and the traditional land on which he was found.

Inlaid in opal, the remains probably belong to four plant protection dinosaurs related to the iguanodontian dinosaur. Various at the beginning of the Cretaceous, this dinosaur taxon was found mainly in Europe and North America.

Fostoria is only the second described in Australia, and also the youngest. Unlike its Australian counterpart, located in central Queensland, the bone layer where these fossils were found – which was once a lush floodplain of lakes and rivers – is stratigraphically higher.

As such, the authors believe that these dinosaurs once roamed the eastern margin of the Australian Inland Sea, which existed in the middle of the Cretaceous, when Australia was part of the Gondwanaland supercontinent.

Opalised fossils support earlier claims that this particular dinosaur taxon, which had a horse-shaped skull and a kangaroo-like body, was more widespread geographically than we thought.

(Bell, Vertebrate Paleontology, 2019)

When Australia 's inland sea began to disappear, about 100 million years ago, the drying sandstone near Lightning Ridge began to grow in acidity, releasing silica that s & # rsquo; is then slowly hardened to become an opal.

When this glittering substance is trapped in the hollows and pockets of decaying dinosaur bones, it creates a scintillating mold of ancient remains.

Based on four of these opal-encrusted fossils found near Lightning Ridge, the authors argue that the Foster Collection belongs to a herd of at least four animals of different sizes, including two large individuals up to 5 meters in length. long (16 feet), a medium sized animal and a small individual.

In addition to their size, the only clear indication of the age of these dinosaurs was a single arch of caudal caudal mid-caudal, unfused, suggesting that one of the smaller animals did not have still reached skeletal maturity.

"We have bones from all parts of the body, but not a complete skeleton," Bell said. National Geographic. "This includes rib bones, arms, skull, back, tail, hips and legs, so it's one of the most famous dinosaurs in the world." 39, Australia … [with] 15 to 20% of the skeleton of the species. "

Now imagine all those precious dinosaur fossils sitting behind a glass in an opal shop, languishing for decades.

The research was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.