Natural History Museum experts find first evidence of dinosaur species in Australia

Evidence that a ten-metre meat-eating dinosaur from 125 million years ago with a crocodile-shaped mouth and claws like a bear lived in Australia has been confirmed by Natural History Museum experts who compared it with backbones from their own collection.

A baronyx specimen at the London venue is identical to one found by a team who travelled to Australia, suggesting that the spinosaur dinosaur of the Early Cretaceous period roamed the Earth, rather than remaining segregated by the north and south continents of the era.

Spinosaurs would have thrived just as the single “supercontinent” the earth was made of, called Pangaea, was starting to break into a southern continent, Gondwana, and a northern continent, Laurasia.

“The new fossil is the first example of a spinosaurid dinosaur from Australia,” says the museum’s Paul Barrett, who collaborated with peers from the University of Cambridge and a pair of museums and universities in Australia on the trip to the Victoria site.

“The finds are showing many of the dinosaurs that we used to think of as distinctively ‘northern’ or ‘southern’ in character were much more widespread during this particular period of Earth history.

“We’re starting to find more similarities than differences as we look at these recent finds in more detail.”

The first southern tyrannosaur, which had been though to dwell only in the northern continents, was found in Australia in March 2010.

• Read our review of Age of the Dinosaur at the Natural History Museum.