A fossil unearthed in Australia suggests that dinosaurs roaming Earth's single supercontinent before it fragmented occupied a much larger geographical range than previously thought.

Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum in London and his colleagues analysed a fossilized vertebra found in southern Australia. It dates back to the Early Cretaceous period between about 145 million and 100 million years ago — the time during which the supercontinent Pangaea was splitting up. The bone is from a spinosaurid theropod, a carnivorous bipedal dinosaur. The specimen is surprisingly similar to spinosaurids from Pangaea's northern region, Laurasia.

This finding, along with other recent fossil discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere of dinosaurs that were thought to have lived only in the north, suggests that dinosaurs had a near-global distribution before the continental separation.

Biol. Lett. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2011.0466 (2011)