The specimen is the first such dinosaur identified in Australia but one that is nearly identical to a UK creature. This suggests northern and southern hemisphere dinos had a lot more in common than previously thought.
The traditional idea has been that these ancient animals could be placed into distinctive, geographically separated, groups. This small vertebra undermines that view, says Dr Paul Barrett from London's Natural History Museum. "After looking at this specimen and having been forced to re-assess the distribution of spinosaurids, we took a look at other dinosaur groups from Australia, including the Tyrannosaur our team announced last year," he told BBC News. "Taking all this evidence into account, we started to realise that a lot of dinosaur groups we'd thought of as either northern specialists or southern specialists actually had more cosmopolitan distributions." It may be just one bone, but the team says it displays features that are unmistakably those of a spinosaurid. The vertebra, which is almost certainly from a juvenile, was unearthed on the coast of Victoria state. It is hugely reminiscent of the neck bones in the well-known British dinosaur Baryonyx walkeri.
