> 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.
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!
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> 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
> 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