> The Spanish Diplodocus lived roughly 150 million years ago near the end of the Jurassic period.
> [...]
> According to the team, the presence of Diplodocus in Iberia offers strong evidence that dinosaurs moved between North America and Europe during that era, likely crossing temporary land bridges that appeared as the proto-North Atlantic Ocean periodically receded.
I want a map! I found this: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/167017/view Is it the correct map? Is there a land (ice?) bridge between Newfoundland and Portugal? Am I interpreting it correctly?
Too far south for an ice bridge - Newfoundland is south like modern Florida - tropical. And it's the Jurassic, hot with high sea levels, so even though its continental shelf extends out towards Spain, there are no ice ages to bare it (as was the Eastern US shelf a mere 12k years ago). But Pangea is ripping apart, it's a mess with crust blocks variously uplifted and tilted, massive weathering and sediment fluxes, so... maybe a transient island chain???
FWIW "American" might be more continental than national; my recollection is that one of the places where tons of dinosaur bones were found in the early paleontology days is Alberta.
Looks like there was a land-bridge to "Europe" around the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary if you stick it in Paleotopography mode.
(I like that mode better because it appears to show the actual landmasses at the time vs the plates with an approximation of the modern masses overlayed)
What's wild about this is that it makes really obvious how limited our perspective on dinosaur biodiversity is. Our best view on the best-known dinosaurs comes from a few places that were really good for finding fossils from specific eras.
And then you're using a bit of the west and Great Plains (Utah, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota) for all the different species that live in North America.
We've only got snapshots of them in time - often from some disaster which aided in the formation of fossils... but all that other time, species evolved and went extinct without leaving a single identifiable fossil.
(One of my families great roadtrips of my youth was out to Dinosaur National Monument during a sibling's dinosaur phase... and it was neat. I was there on a road trip of my own in '09, but it hadn't reopened yet... someday I'll get back out there again.)
Apparently I'm a bit slow today, because my brain started completing the headline as "Diplodocus, Long Thought Extinct, ..." before my eyes could finish reading it.
> The animal’s fossilized remains — 14 well-preserved tail vertebrae and several chevron bones — were unearthed at the La Tejería site near the city of El Castellar in the Spanish province of Teruel.
According to Wikipedia (if I'm reading correctly), the chevron bones are also part of the tail [1]. It's pretty cool how such a small part of the skeleton can carry so much information!
Once again, history and medicine are two fields that reliably make me happy. Dinos were my faves as a child and they continue to inspire. The way we (my family) mispronounced this one: diploDOEcus. But I also got Heredotus very wrong, so I guess it was a Midwest thing.
I am not a dinosaur expert, but the headline seems off.
The actual paper linked from sci.news starts with this (citations removed):
> Diplodocids are known from deposits present in the U.S.A., Europe, South America, and Africa. According to the available evidence, the oldest diplodocid sauropod dates back to the Oxfordian of Europe, whereas the most recent ones are from the lowermost Cretaceous of South America and Africa.
It als says that "The European diplodocid fossil record is scarce and fragmentary," but that still sounds like evidence for Diplodocus in Europe, doesn't it?
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 65.9 ms ] thread> [...]
> According to the team, the presence of Diplodocus in Iberia offers strong evidence that dinosaurs moved between North America and Europe during that era, likely crossing temporary land bridges that appeared as the proto-North Atlantic Ocean periodically receded.
I want a map! I found this: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/167017/view Is it the correct map? Is there a land (ice?) bridge between Newfoundland and Portugal? Am I interpreting it correctly?
The map is super cool though. Makes you think of the earth as something still aging since it looks clearly “earth” but with major differences.
Maps.[1][2]
Too far south for an ice bridge - Newfoundland is south like modern Florida - tropical. And it's the Jurassic, hot with high sea levels, so even though its continental shelf extends out towards Spain, there are no ice ages to bare it (as was the Eastern US shelf a mere 12k years ago). But Pangea is ripping apart, it's a mess with crust blocks variously uplifted and tilted, massive weathering and sediment fluxes, so... maybe a transient island chain???
[1] https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=topo_recon [2] rocks: https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GeologyR key: https://portal.gplates.org/portal/geology/
Another example of quality American production moving overseas. Globalization will be the end of us
[Canada welcomes EU proposal to become 'associate member'][1]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49740507
(I like that mode better because it appears to show the actual landmasses at the time vs the plates with an approximation of the modern masses overlayed)
In the "Triassic to Jurassic (252 to 145 million years ago)" section further down, there is this image, which I think shows a kind of land bridge between the two continents: https://earthathome.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/North_Ame...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stratigraphic_units_wi...
And then you're using a bit of the west and Great Plains (Utah, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota) for all the different species that live in North America.
And beyond that, the other dimension. Diplodocus was around for 10 million years give or take... 10 million years before the Anthropocene and you were in the Miocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Miocene_mammals_of_No...
We've only got snapshots of them in time - often from some disaster which aided in the formation of fossils... but all that other time, species evolved and went extinct without leaving a single identifiable fossil.
(One of my families great roadtrips of my youth was out to Dinosaur National Monument during a sibling's dinosaur phase... and it was neat. I was there on a road trip of my own in '09, but it hadn't reopened yet... someday I'll get back out there again.)
> The animal’s fossilized remains — 14 well-preserved tail vertebrae and several chevron bones — were unearthed at the La Tejería site near the city of El Castellar in the Spanish province of Teruel.
According to Wikipedia (if I'm reading correctly), the chevron bones are also part of the tail [1]. It's pretty cool how such a small part of the skeleton can carry so much information!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemal_arch
> Diplodocids are known from deposits present in the U.S.A., Europe, South America, and Africa. According to the available evidence, the oldest diplodocid sauropod dates back to the Oxfordian of Europe, whereas the most recent ones are from the lowermost Cretaceous of South America and Africa.
It als says that "The European diplodocid fossil record is scarce and fragmentary," but that still sounds like evidence for Diplodocus in Europe, doesn't it?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/02724634.2026.271842...