MEET MUTTABURRASAURUS

Discovery and name The name Muttaburrasaurus means ‘Muttaburra lizard’, after the place where it was first found. Muttaburrasaurus was named by palaeontologists Alan Bartholomai and Ralph Molnar in 1981.

Lived where and when? Muttaburrasaurus lived in the Middle Cretaceous (approximately 100-98 million years ago) in Australia. Muttaburrasaurus has been recovered from incomplete material near Muttaburra and Hughenden, Queensland and teeth from Lightening Ridge, New South Wales.

Size Measuring seven metres long, four metres high and weighing three tonnes, Muttaburrasaurus is the largest known two-legged, plant eating dinosaur from Australia.

Strange skull and teeth The head of Muttaburrasaurus is unusual in containing a large, bulging muzzle. This structure may have given an increased sense of smell, inflated with air to make noise for communication, or have been brightly coloured for display. The powerful jaws of Muttaburrasaurus had a horny beak at the front and were lined behind with teeth for shearing cycads and ferns.

Uncertain relationships and disappearing spikes When first discovered, palaeontologists thought that Muttaburrasaurus resembled Iguanodon, a plant eating dinosaur from the Northern Hemisphere. This resulted in the unknown parts of Muttaburrasaurus being reconstructed like Iguanodon, including the presence of a large, thumb spike used for defence.

However, recent studies on the relationships of Muttaburrasaurus have shown that it was not closely related to Iguanodon and that it probably lacked a thumb spike - making many skeletons in Australian museums incorrect! It is currently thought that Muttaburrasaurus was more closely related to smaller, primitive plant eating dinosaurs.

Getting around Some of the famous dinosaur track-ways in the world come from Lark Quarry, near Winton in Queensland. Most of the tracks were made by small two-legged dinosaurs. Palaeontologists first thought that one large set of footprints belonged to a two-legged meat-eating dinosaur. They are now thought to belong to a large plant-eater, similar to Muttaburrasaurus.

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