Australotitan

 The way in which we are given an idea of how big something is, other than by official weights and measures, is always interesting.  It assumes that for most people the formal expressions mean very little once they get beyond familiar numbers, and so we resort to other ways of getting the idea across.  Volumes are often expressed in terms of Olympic swimming pools.  The next step up from the swimming pools is the SydHarb, the amount of water in Sydney Harbour, considered to be  approximately 562 gigalitres.

 The Australotitan, our newest dinosaur, has been described as being the equivalent of 1,400 red kangaroos.  I’m not sure that my mind can stretch to encompass 1,400 red kangaroos.  I assume that ‘red’ is specified because the red kangaroo is the biggest.  Perhaps it should be so many paddocks of kangaroos. Another way of expressing it has been to say that it was two buses long.

 Anyway, Australotitan was big. It was a titanosaurian sauropod which means that it was a member of the genus Sauropoda, a group of herbivorous dinoaurs with a small head and long neck and tail.  The Australotitans were to be found in southwest Queensland  92 to 96 million years ago.  The particular specimen that has been found has been given the name ‘Cooper’ from the nearby Cooper Creek.

Could it be that there is a nod there to Cooper Cronk, the titan of Queensland Rugby League?