Millions of people around the world have stood beneath a Diplodocus skeleton in London, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. For nearly 150 years, every confirmed bone of the animal came from one place, the western U.S. Then Sergio Sánchez Fenollosa and his colleagues found that same anatomical signature in a set of tail vertebrae dug up in Teruel, Spain.
The roughly 150-million-year-old remains turned out to be the first confirmed Diplodocus fossils ever found outside North America, the team reports in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. During the Late Jurassic, falling sea levels may have exposed land that dinosaurs could walk across between the continents.
“With each new result, the picture became clearer: we were looking at a Diplodocus,” Sánchez Fenollosa, the study’s lead author, said in a press release.
Identifying the First Diplodocus Fossils Found in Spain
(Image Credit: Sergio Sánchez Fenollosa / Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology/ CC BY)
The first five vertebrae turned up at La Tejería back in 2008. It wasn’t until excavations in 2014 and 2015 that the team recovered nine more, along with several chevrons, the bones attached beneath the tail vertebrae. Some of the vertebrae were still connected in the order they’d been in while the animal was alive. The whole find covered roughly 108 square feet (10 square meters).
That’s a small sliver of an animal that Alberto Cobos, one of the study’s co-authors, estimates was about 82 feet (25 meters) long. But even that partial tail is among Europe’s most complete finds from the dinosaur’s wider family. Earlier finds from this family in the region included a tooth and scraps of hip and tail bone.
Explore All OptionsSánchez Fenollosa, Cobos, and co-author Josué García Cobeña measured the bones by hand with calipers or a tape measure and compared them with published descriptions of other long-necked, plant-eating sauropods. The vertebrae had deep grooves running underneath and no ridges along the sides, while the chevrons were forked.
The team recognized that combination in Diplodocus and checked the identification with computer analyses of the animals’ relationships. The results shuffled other parts of the family tree around, but every version placed the Spanish dinosaur on the Diplodocus branch.
Read More: First-Ever Adult T. rex Trackway Shows the Dinosaur Took 13-Foot Strides
How Dinosaurs Could Have Crossed Between Continents
Diplodocus now joins Allosaurus and Stegosaurus among dinosaurs known from Jurassic rocks on both sides of the Atlantic. At the time these animals lived, the ocean was still opening between the continents.
As sea levels fell, stretches of land may have appeared between what’s now Newfoundland and the Iberian Peninsula, home to modern Spain and Portugal. Those temporary routes could have offered animals a way to wander from one continent to the other.
Finding the same dinosaur on both continents helps make the case for those connections. But the bones don’t tell the researchers exactly when Diplodocus crossed between them or which route it took.
Getting to Know Spain’s Diplodocus
The team can identify the animal as Diplodocus, but the tail doesn’t preserve enough detail to pin down its species. In their analyses, the Spanish animal came out closest to the North American species Diplodocus hallorum. Finding a more complete skeleton in Europe could help them work out just how closely the two were related.
The sediments surrounding the bones were deposited on a coastal plain shaped by rivers. Other enormous plant eaters, including Turiasaurus and Losillasaurus, also lived in what is now Teruel, Cobos notes in the Dinópolis Foundation’s press release. These dinosaurs belonged to a different branch of the sauropod family.
The original tail bones are now on display at Dinópolis in Teruel, while visitors in El Castellar can see replicas of the bones unearthed nearby. For anyone growing up there, the Diplodocus they might recognize from a museum visit is an animal that once lived where they do.
Read More: Small Dinosaurs May Have Had an Evolutionary Advantage Over Their Enormous Relatives
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: Intercontinental evidence of the iconic genus Diplodocus Marsh, 1878 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)
