Round One: Australotitan vs Mansourasaurus
Australotitan (left) or Mansourasaurus (right)?
Australotitan
Mansourasaurus
Factfiles:
Australotitan cooperensis
Artwork by Vlad Konstantinov, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Southern titan from Cooper Creek
Time: ~95 million years ago (Cenomanian to Turonian stages of the Late Cretaceous)
Location: Winton Formation, Australia
Nicknamed “Cooper” by its discoverers in 2005, Australotitan was big news on the Australian dinosaur scene for years before its discovery because it was clear this dinosaur was Huge. It took 5 years of preparation and 10 years of study and reconstruction before Cooper was finally published in 2021, and secured its official title as the largest Australian dinosaur known to science! While exact weight measurements for titanosaurs are extremely difficult, it fits into the same size class as other newly-famous giants like Dreadnoughtus and Patagotitan. The bones themselves show signs of being trampled over by a convoy of smaller sauropods that left a 100 metre fossil trackway over the site. Honestly, the disrespect to an icon like Cooper!
Mansourasaurus shahinae
Artwork by Andrew McAfee, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Shahin’s Mansoura reptile (after Mansoura University and honouring Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center founder Mona Shahin)
Time: 74-72 million years ago (Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous)
Location: Quseir Formation, Egypt
Mansourasaurus was described in 2018 from bones found as the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt, and known from the most complete fossil skeleton of any vertebrate found so far from the latest Cretaceous of Africa! It was modest-sized by titanosaur standards, at roughly 10 metres long and weighing about 5 tonnes, but some bones of the skeleton being unfused means this was still a juvenile, and potentially had a lot more growing to do. Unlike other African titanosaurs, Mansourasaurus seems not to have been from a local family, and instead fills sort of an “exchange student from a European family” kinda role. All of its closest relatives form a clade of titanosaurs known only from Eurasia, but Mansourasaurus decided to be a bit adventurous and take a trip abroad for some reason. What makes this weirder is trying to figure out how it got there, since at the time Africa was fully not attached to Europe at the time. It’s possible that its ancestors swam to Africa via island-hopping since Europe was an archipelago at the time, which is absolutely wild!
DMM Round One Masterpost
