A fight to the death between two dinosaurs has put a Queensland sedimentary geologist at the centre of one of the most important, and legally complex, palaeontological finds in history.
James Cook University associate professor Eric Roberts is leading the geological aspect of the study of two dinosaurs that killed each other in battle and were found still entwined 66 million years later in a Montana creek bed.
Dr Roberts said it's been a long haul waiting to see if the dinosaurs were going to available to a public institution where then can be properly displayed and studied.
He said the Tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops were discovered tangled together, leading to the hypothesis that, after succumbing to their injuries, they sank into the swampy floodplain of Late Cretaceous Montana some 66 million years ago.
"The triceratops is reported to have teeth in its spine and pelvis and the T-Rex seems to have broken teeth and fractures that may be associated with trauma, Dr Roberts said.
"Both are extraordinarily well-preserved. Each specimen is among the most complete of its kind ever found. It's arguably one of the most amazing dinosaur fossil discoveries ever."
Dr Roberts said they were discovered by private fossil hunters in 2006 and are so important as to be potentially worth millions of dollars.
Scientists have been deeply concerned they would end up in private hands and be inaccessible to researchers.
"The subsequent legal battle over whether fossils were owned by the landowner or the mineral rights holder took a long time to resolve," Dr Roberts said.
"It's not until this year that their ownership has been legally established and they were able to be purchased by a non-profit group and donated to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences."
The fossils will be housed in a new expansion to the museum at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and will be studied in a cutting-edge palaeontology lab that will open in 2022.
Dr Roberts, who comes from Colorado, said his role and that of JCU honours student Stuart Hodgson is to establish the geological framework of the fossil site.
"Stuart and I are working on dating the fossil, and helping to unravel the mystery of how and why these two dinosaurs came to be deposited together," he said.
The JCU pair will return to the site and museum to work on the project with Dr Lindsay Zanno and the rest of the team in the US as soon as it is possible to travel again.
"The project will take several years to complete, because most of the fossils are still entombed in rock matrix that must be carefully prepared at the museum before we can fully examine them and test the hypothesis of these as duelling dinosaurs," Dr Roberts said.
