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1.      Good photo of a Kakuru tibia bone.

           323 mm long,  150 grams

2.      Lots of information on kakuru.

3.      More photos of Kakuru bones.

4.      When Australian dinosaurs lived.

Kakuru was a small Australian dinosaur. It grew to about two metres long. (A normal doorway is two metres high.)

The name 'Kakuru' is actually an Aboriginal name. It means 'rainbow serpent'. It comes from an Aboriginal dreaming story about a rainbow serpent.  The word 'kakuru' comes from the Guyani people whose country is around today's town of Andamooka in South Australia.

Some scientists think that Kakuru might have belonged to a new family of dinosaurs. This is all because of a single piece of leg bone which had been turned to opal over millions of years. The bone was in a shop in Adelaide when it was seen by Mr Neville Pledge in 1973. Luckily he made a copy of the bone which was soon sold and disappeared. The bone showed that Kakuru was different from most other dinosaurs.

Kakuru was built for speed. It was probably a good runner and it could have run away to escape from bigger hunters. The dinosaur was probably a carnivore (meat eater).

These theropod dinosaurs live in the early Cretaceous period, about 120 million years ago.