AUSTRALIAN DINOSAURS

Not many dinosaurs are known from the Mesozoic of Australia. In fact only 25 have proper scientific names based on fossil material. Even though dinosaurs first evolved in the Triassic Period, no dinosaur bones of this age have ever been found in Australia. And yet, we know dinosaurs lived in Australia during the Triassic, since footprints have been found in Triassic rocks from southeast Queensland.

In Australia there have been some scattered discoveries of dinosaur footprints but most occur in a handful of locations. When it is possible to assign them to ichnospecies some names are used to describe similar footprints the world over, others appear to be unique to Australia.

The Mesozoic Era includes three periods: the Triassic (251–201 Mya), Jurassic (201–145 Mya), and the Cretaceous (145–66 Mya), the longest of the three periods, extending 80 million years when the dinosaurs and many other animals and plants became extinct.