New fossil finding upends Victoria's dino ecosystem

About 120 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous period, Victoria was in forever winter. Our continent had drifted down towards the very bottom of the world. Its southern coast was a vast river in a rift valley as wide as the Nile, the banks thick with pine trees and the frigid waters teeming with fish.

Among the pines, dinosaurs hunted. Bird-footed southern raptors fossicked in the shallows for fish, and mid-sized megaraptorids with curved claws and toothy grins.

This picture has always seemed, to paleontologists, incomplete. There are many prey animals represented in the fossil records – but no Tyrannosaurus rex.

We are missing a super-predator. A new discovery by a team of volunteers and scientists published Thursday takes a big step to solving that riddle by unearthing tantalising first evidence a large predatory dinosaur, never before seen here: carcharodontosauria.



https://www.theage.com.au/national/new-fossil-finding-upends-victoria-s-dino-ecosystem-20250219-p5ldgu.html

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Edited to add: This is where the fossil was found - very close to where I live.