The National Geographic has a story about the discovery a new dinosaur in Australia.  The animal, called Fostoria dhimbangunmal, lived about 150 million years ago.  It’s an early member of a group that will eventually evolve into duck-billed hadrosaurs.  The bones are opalized and was discovered near a town called Lightning Ridge, famous for brightly colored opals.  All the details are in a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“Any time we find a new Australian dinosaur it’s interesting, because we have so few,” says Stephen Poropat, a paleontologist from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne who was not on the study team. The tally of known Australian dinosaurs is currently around 24, he notes, including Weewarrasaurus, another species from Lightning Ridge described last year.

The newest species, Fostoria dhimbangunmal, was an Iguanodon-like dinosaur that lived about a hundred million years ago during the mid-Cretaceous period, when this region was a broad floodplain with lakes and rivers flowing into the inland Eromanga Sea.

“The floodplains were frequently wet and richly vegetated, meaning they were a good place for plant-eating dinosaurs,” says study leader Phil Bell, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales.

Studying dinosaurs from the time slice at Lightning Ridge is important, Poropat adds, as the world was then experiencing the warmest conditions of the past 150 million years.

“These dinosaurs were living in a really incredible greenhouse Earth,” he says. “The globe would have potentially looked quite different, and these fossils can tell us how these dinosaurs were coping.”