Amateur fossil hunters helped discover evidence of a Cretaceous Era food chain in the Australian Outback.

YouTube video by Australian Age of Dinosaurs

An "extremely rare" fossil discovery in outback Queensland has revealed a new species of prehistoric bird that roamed Australia more than 100 million years ago. While digging in the remains of an ancient inland sea near Richmond, about 500km inland from Townsville, Kevin Petersen uncovered a long, slender bone. The then-curator of marine fossil museum Kronosaurus Korner sent a picture to University of New England palaeontologist Matt White, who drove to Richmond to have a look. "I was first looking at bones that looked quite similar in China … over 20 years ago, so I knew exactly what they were," Dr White said. A week later, another bone was found. "We usually find a lot of marine reptiles out at Richmond, but to find bird bones, it's extremely rare," Dr White said. Filing in the gaps Researchers used the fossilised tarsometatarsus, a fused foot bone found in birds, and tibiotarsus, the longest leg bone, to formally describe a new bird species, Tenuicruris piscanexum, which experts believe lived during the Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago. Dr White said the bird likely had teeth and was roughly the size of a scrub turkey, with completed fossils found in China and...