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New dinosaur species found

CANBERRA: Scientists have confirmed for the first time that Australia was once home to a dinosaur that was big, fast and terrifying, and they have named it like something from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Meet the Australovenator. The beast was a 500 kg meat-eating predator with three slashing claws on each of its powerful forelimbs that stalked the outback 98 million years ago, researchers said in a report published on Friday.

Fossilised remnants of its limb bones, ribs, jaw and fangs were found — along with bones of two other new species of gigantic, long-necked herbivores weighing up to 20 metric tonnes — in Queensland State over the past three years.

The discovery, analysed in a 51-page report published in the online science journal PLoS ONE, was the first substantial find of large dinosaurs in Australia to be revealed in 28 years.

The finders nicknamed the 5-metre long carnivore, Australovenator wintonensis, “Banjo.”

“The cheetah of his time, Banjo was light and agile,” said the report’s lead author, Scott Hocknull, a Queensland Museum palaeontologist. The other two finds — 16-metre long herbivores — were previously unknown types of titanosaur, the largest dinosaurs that ever lived.

The giraffe-like Wintonotitan wattsi, wasnicknamed “Clancy” and the hippopotamus-like Diamantinasaurus matildae has been nicknamed Matilda

All three lived in the mid-Cretaceous period which extended from 145 million years to 65 million years ago. — AP

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