It’s unusual to find dinosaur fossils in Australia; the continent has few mountains and other outcroppings that would reveal the bones.
So when 14-year-old Sandy Mackenzie found what he thought might be a dinosaur bone on his family’s land in South West Queensland in 2004, researchers flocked to uncover a prehistoric world that lay just below the sandy surface.
Meet Cooper: The Australian Dinosaur
Just two years later, excavations began on "Cooper" — a brand-new species now known as Australotitan cooperensis, aptly nicknamed after nearby Cooper Creek.
“He’s about the length of a basketball court,” says Scott Hocknull, a paleontologist at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane involved in the research.
