LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: When a teenage boy in Queensland went out on the farm one day to help his dad, he ended up not only rounding up sheep, but also discovering one of Australia's largest dinosaurs. Now, years later, that fossilised dinosaur is about to be displayed publicly for the first time at a new dinosaur museum in Outback Queensland. Josh Bavis reports.

JOSH BAVIS, REPORTER: When Sandy Mackenzie was just a teenager, he made a discovery that would put the tiny remote town of Eromanga on the map.

SANDY MACKENZIE, GRAZIER: Oh, well, I was just - I was riding along the bike and saw a rock and it looked a bit different to every other rock out there, I suppose.

JOSH BAVIS: The 14-year-old was mustering sheep near his parents' property and nearly ran over what turned out to be a prehistoric fossil.

SANDY MACKENZIE: Just picked it up and chucked it in the back of the ute. It was ratting around in the back of the ute for a couple of weeks until Dad took it into the museum and found out it was something pretty special.

SCOTT HOCKNULL, QUEENSLAND MUSEUM: I went, "Yep, that's a dinosaur alright," and since then, we've found dinosaurs that are beyond any comprehension.

JOSH BAVIS: It was the first solid clue that this remote part of Queensland was once home to some of the largest dinosaurs to ever roam the Earth.

SCOTT HOCKNULL: Every fossil you find out in the west, in south-west Queensland in particular, now, we had no idea about dinosaurs or even any fossils really until 2004.

JOSH BAVIS: In the years that followed, several dinosaur sites were discovered. During one particular find in 2007, the diggers struck dinosaur gold.

DIGGER: Very strange-looking animal. Don't know what it is. Very thin.

DIGGER II: We've got bone in here. Trying to define how large it is.

JOSH BAVIS: The fossilised bones reveal a massive Titanosaur, the biggest discovery in Australia. He was affectionately named Cooper, a plant-eating giant from the Cretaceous Period which stretched up to 30 metres in length.

SCOTT HOCKNULL: Based on what we know so far, clearly Cooper is something different. It's big, it's Australia's largest dinosaur and it's one of the coolest-looking big Titanosaurs, the big, long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs that walked Australia.

JOSH BAVIS: Now Cooper's fossilised bones are being prepared to go on show to the public for the first time at the newly-built Eromanga Natural History Museum. This prehistoric secret is being revealed one tiny piece at a time.

There's evidence Cooper was trapped in mud before being trampled by another Titanosaur roughly the same size. An excavator's found a tree branch jammed in its leg.

WOMAN: They actually act like traps for plants, so you often find debris, stick debris, whichever way the water's actually flowing. We can see that there's actually a piece of timber and that was embedded into the bone.

JOSH BAVIS: At least four other Titanosaurs also found in the Eromanga Basin since Cooper are now being housed here.

Each piece is stored away in these plaster cocoons, which still need to be drilled away by special tools to reveal what's left of the bones.

SCOTT HOCKNULL: And just recently we finished an excavation that had fragments of bones sitting in rock that may even be bigger than Cooper.

JOSH BAVIS: If one of the recent finds is bigger than Cooper, it would rival the world's biggest, Argentinosaurus, which reached up 35 metres in length.

After seven years of studying Cooper's fossils, Dr Scott Hocknull is working on a scientific paper to officially recognise Cooper as a brand new species along with a brand new name.

These finds in the Outback are just the tip of the iceberg of what else is hidden just under the surface.

The hunt is on for fossils of carnivorous dinosaurs which once roamed here. Scientists say there's evidence of their existence like recently-discovered tracks in this region.

New technology is revealing more about Australian fossils than ever before.

SCOTT HOCKNULL: CT scanning can look through the bones or through the rocks, looking at footprints or how the bone was structured. Photogrammetry can take the bone itself that maybe 200 kilos and turn it into a little model that you can hold in your hand. All this is completely revolutionising the way we even do our science. So nowadays, instead of just taking a happy snap of the actual bone, we recreate the whole bone in three dimensions and that gives us more data than we could ever poke a stick at.

JOSH BAVIS: The recreation of prehistoric life is set to bring a new outlook for a town gripped by drought.

FIONA FERGUSON, VOLUNTEER: Oh, it's just so very exciting for the community, especially. Hopefully it'll bring lots of tourists and really help our town.

WENDY GROVES, VOLUNTEER: This is my relaxation away from all my other things that happen in my life, the drought and, yes.

JOSH BAVIS: The museum's been more than a decade in planning by Mayor Stuart Mackenzie and his wife Robyn since their son Sandy discovered the first bone.

STUART MACKENZIE, MAYOR, QUILPIE SHIRE: We thought there'd be sort of a groundswell of support from museums, universities, governments or whatever, but that wasn't the case. and it's probably not too much to state that I don't think you'd find anywhere else in Australia where such a small community has contributed so much to something which is so nationally significant.

JOSH BAVIS: In anticipation of Cooper's debut to the public and to Palaeontology Journal, there's no time to waste to prepare for the flood of visitors.

ROBYN MACKENZIE, WIFE: Australia's largest dinosaurs - that's the big thing you're going to see here.

SCOTT HOCKNULL: And without these regional museums showcasing it to Australians and to everyone overseas, you wouldn't know that story.

LEIGH SALES: Josh Bavas reporting.