Yahoo Movies 100 Million-Year-Old Plesiosaur Skeleton Found in Australia May Hold the 'Key to Future Research'
A rare dinosaur fossil has been unearthed in Australia — and its discovery could be groundbreaking.
The Queensland Museum announced this week that the skeleton of a 100-million-year-old "long-necked marine reptile," known as a plesiosaur, was found in western Queensland.
Amateur fossil hunters found the remains on a cattle station in August, according to CNN and The Guardian. It's the first time that a head and associated body have been found in Australia, according to the museum.
Dr. Espen Knutsen, senior curator of paleontology at the Queensland Museum, has compared the find to that of the Rosetta Stone, which helped experts to decode Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, CNN reported.
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"This could hold the key to future research in this field," Knutsen said in a statement Wednesday, per the outlet.
Queensland Museum Network
In a video shared on Queensland Museum's YouTube page, Knutsen said having such a "beautifully preserved three-dimensional skull with a body" will allow researchers to do much more "scientifically" than they could before.
"The fact that this guy had a body and head in the same animal is really important for us to be able to understand how many species of these things were there around the time," he explained in the clip.
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The dinosaur is described by the museum as an "elasmosaur," a kind of plesiosaur during the early Cretaceous period. At the time, the area was covered with about 50 feet of water.
Queensland Museum Network
Knutsen and a team of paleontologists recently traveled to the site "to collect the fossil," according to the Queensland Museum.
The "beautifully preserved" specimen comes with a row of teeth in the back of the jaw, though it's missing a small portion of its snout. Most importantly, however, the head was still attached to the body.
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Knutsen said the fossils will help "teach us much more about the history" of both the sea and the species that lived there.
The shape of skull and teeth, for instance, will help them determine what kinds of food the dinosaur was eating, he shared.
"It's a beautiful specimen to show the public, but just really important for the understanding of everything that we're trying to do when it comes to knowledge of these fauna," Knutsen explained in the YouTube clip.
