Researchers find how dinosaurs moved from South America to Australia

The discovery of two fossilized dinosaur skeletons in Queensland is expected to help researchers figure out how did these extinct enormous beasts moved from South America to Australia.

According to a new study, which published this week in Scientific Reports, both sets of dinosaur fossils belong to titanosaurs, a sort of dinosaur that roamed Australia nearly 95 million years ago.

Researchers believe that those dinosaurs’ ancestors migrated to Australia during the mid-Cretaceous Period, when the climate was warmer and the polar areas were much easier to traverse. During those times, Australia and South America were connected to Antarctica.

The research is also expected to help researchers determine how those extinct huge creatures evolved through time, amid changing climate.

Lead author Stephen Poropat, a paleontologist from Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, said, “A new dinosaur like Wade, or Savannasaurus, will allow us to work out how these dinosaurs evolved through time, how they responded to climatic changes, and also how they responded to changes in the positions of the continents as well.”

The fossils in question were discovered by David Elliott, a co-founder of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, in 2005 when he was guiding a herd of sheep through central Queensland.