It was likely that monstrous dinosaurs once roamed the Australian continent eons of years ago and while the land mass was still attached to a super sub-continent that scientists called Gondwana.

This was suggested in a new report that according to palaeontologist Erich Fitzgerald pointed to the possibility that Australia was once home to beast predators known as ceratosaurs, which can be compared to the hugely popular T-Rex or tyrannosaurus rex in ferocity.

The dreaded T-Rex entered into mainstream consciousness thanks mostly to the Jurassic movie series by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg.

Earlier studies and literatures have indicated that Australia was not in the immediate map of the dinosaur world owing to almost non-existent evidences that would suggest the otherwise, Mr Fitzgerald said.

"Apart from Antarctica, Australia has the world's most poorly-known dinosaur record," the scientist told Agence France Presse (AFP).

He noted that Australia, Antarctica and India were once locked together as Gondwana before a monumental split that occurred some 80 to 150 million years ago.

That fact, however, pointed to indications that somewhere in Australia dinosaurs may have lived and died as confirmed by new finding, which was detailed in the report recently published by journal Naturwissenschaften.

The report revealed the discovery of an ankle bone fossil, which Mr Fitzgerald said was unearthed by an amateur palaeontologist in 2006 on the coastal town of San Remo, about 87 kilometres from Melbourne.

The find was measured at over two inches but scientists said the fossil's discovery in an Australian location was what made it significant as previously the availability of such evidences in the country was at most scant.

The fossil also attested to Australia as part of the global distribution of gigantic and meat-eating dinosaurs, Mr Fitzgerald said.

"Until now, this group of dinosaurs (ceratosaurs) has been strangely absent from Australia, but now at last we know they were here," Mr Fitzgerald told AFP.

"The ceratosaur and other new discoveries show that several dinosaur groups were here. These dinosaur lineages date back to the Jurassic, 170 million years ago, when dinosaurs could walk between any two continents," he added.

Another exciting point highlighted by the discovery is the likelihood that gargantuan beasts like the tyrannosaurs and allosaurs once thumped over the Australian land mass, which in the future could confirm that "the dinosaurs we see here are not unique weirdos like modern koalas and kangaroos on a global scale."

Based on the admittedly small fossil find, which ironically provided enough data for scientists to deduce that locations in and around Australia may soon yield more bones that could serve as "representatives of groups that are actually found everywhere else."

"We really have this melting pot ... where it was really a cosmopolitan bunch of dinosaurs which called Australia home 125 million years ago," Mr Fitzgerald said.

"(And) these meat-eating dinosaurs in Australia represent globe-trotting groups which spread out across the world before the continents began to separate," he stressed.