Scientists have unearthed 17 tooth from a large herbivorous dinosaur that roamed Queensland hundreds of thousands of years in the past in an “exceptionally uncommon” Australian discover.
The tooth had been found close to the western Queensland city of Winton, which palaeontologists consider was on the fringe of an inland ocean round 96 million years in the past.
A number of partial sauropod skeletons have beforehand been unearthed from the fossil hotspot however cranial stays, together with tooth, stay uncommon.
The Winton-based Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Pure Historical past first found a dozen sauropod tooth among the many scattered fossilised stays in 2019.
A second excavation uncovered one other 5 tooth, bringing the entire discover to 17.
The fossils are nonetheless being examined, however preliminary outcomes point out the tooth belonged to a sauropod that ate up vegetation from a top of 1 to 10 metres.
The plant-eating sauropod diamantinasaurus was one of many largest animals ever to stroll the earth.
Dr Stephen Poropat from Melbourne’s Swinburne College of Expertise stated the invention may reveal new particulars about sauropod diets.
Scientists beforehand thought sauropods couldn’t chew and swallowed stones to grind up meals of their stomachs.
They assumed long-necked dinosaurs used peg-like tooth to rake and slice leaves off timber.
However coarse scratches on the 17 tooth counsel the diamantinasaurus might have chewed tougher meals.
“The comparatively strong tooth of diamantinasaurian sauropods would have enabled them to acquire components of crops that had been comparatively hardy, conifer cones for instance,” Poropat stated.
“The invention is doubly vital as sauropod dinosaur tooth are exceptionally uncommon in Australia, regardless of being comparatively generally preserved parts in Jurassic-Cretaceous deposits elsewhere.”