SYDNEY: Even though the Kunbarrasaurus was a plant-eating dinosaur, if you saw one coming, you might have headed the other way.
With its armoured skin similar to a crocodile and its parrot-like beak, it was certainly a fearsome creature. And now, millions of years after it went extinct, it’s also Australia’s newest dinosaur.
Originally found in 1989 in northwest Queensland, the fossil was previously assumed to be a Minmi — an already established type of ankylosaur found in Australia. Ankylosaurs are a category of four-legged, herbivorous dinosaur, similar to the more well-known stegosaur, University of Queensland PhD student Lucy Leahey, explained.
Decades of research undertaken at the University of Queensland, and published this week in the academic journal PeerJ, now suggests the Kunbarrasaurus is an entirely new genus and species of dinosaur.
After the researchers undertook 3D-computer visualisation of the skull and examined the bones, it became clear the shape of the vertebra was different from the Minmi, and that the dermal armour — the bones in the skin — had different features. “They probably shared a common ancestor, but they are different enough for us to give them a different species and genus name,” Leahy said.
The shape of the ear was also very unusual — it’s very different to ankylosaurs, but also to other dinosaurs. “It’s similar to, but not the same as a turtle,” she said.
The Minmi is also older than the Kunbarrasaurus by about 10 to 20 million years.
