Australian dinosaur had UK double

[Judi Lynn]

14 June 2011 Last updated at 22:43 ET
Australian dinosaur had UK double
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News

A 5cm-wide (2in) fossil may have something big to say about how dinosaurs ranged across the Earth.

The 125-million-year-old neck vertebra belonged to a spinosaurid - an animal with a crocodile-like snout that it probably used to prey on fish.

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.

More:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13763644

[Taverner]

1. How was the state of Pangea at that point?

By that I mean how close was Australia to England?

Land bridge?

[FSogol]

2. Free Gondwanaland!

:shrug:

[mysuzuki2]

3. parallel evolution

[NickB79]

4. Spinosaurids were known to inhabit Africa at that time as well

It's likely they were a wide-ranging genus, and moved over land bridges to Australia, possibly via Antarctica.

It's not unusual to find similar species in Australia compared to Europe or N. America from this time period (late Jurassic/Early Cretaceous): the Australian herbivore Muttaburrasaurus was closely related to Iguanodon (a European species), and the theropod Allosaurus has been found in N. America, Africa and Australia. Minmi is a species of nodosaur with close ties to various N. American species, and there are a whole range of hypsilophodontids native to Australia as well that are similar to European and N. American species.

Only when you transition into the Middle and Late Cretaceous do you see wide divergences as the continents pulled apart to the point that land bridges no longer formed and isolation drove wildly different paths of evolution.