Francisco Ortega
That’s excellent; it’s a sauropod from the Late Jurassic, and although we already have a huge collection of Late Jurassic sauropods on the Iberian Peninsula, adding ‘bricks’ to the wall of knowledge allows us to gradually piece together the bigger picture.
The material is incomplete, but the fossil record attributable to these organisms is relatively scarce in the Late Jurassic of Spain. The available information has enabled them to identify it as a species of Diplodocus, although it has not been possible to attribute it to a specific species.
The Upper Jurassic of the Iberian Peninsula, well represented on the Portuguese coast and in Teruel, bears striking similarities to the Upper Jurassic of the United States and, as such, ties in very well with the iconic faunas of the Morrison Formation. In fact, the transatlantic relationships of the Portuguese Jurassic faunas have been under analysis for some years, and some of the best-known taxa from that formation have been identified, such as Stegosaurus or the carnivore Allosaurus.
A number of sauropods had also been identified to date, with close affinities on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, Allosaurus fragilis, the most iconic theropod of the Morrison Formation, is found in Portugal. Over time, these similarities are increasingly being extended to the Teruel record, and we are beginning to understand that the Portuguese faunas appear in Teruel (and vice versa) and that both share similarities with their North American neighbours (during the Jurassic). Thus, some large carnivores, such as Torvosaurus, appear to be shared across all three records.
In the case of sauropods, the situation appears to be much the same; it has long been suspected that Supersaurus is a genus of Upper Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs shared between the Iberian Peninsula and the United States, and we are even aware of diplodocid remains with very similar representatives on both sides of the Atlantic. In this context, the discovery of Diplodocus in Teruel is yet another important ‘building block’ in our understanding of the process by which the North Atlantic opened up. At that time, the Atlantic was much narrower than it is today, and until very recently there was land connection between the North American and European coasts. Groups of dinosaurs had been able to move occasionally between the two continents, and now, even though they were isolated on either side, genetic drift has not differentiated certain species sufficiently for us to distinguish them by their bones.
In any case, the discovery of Diplodocus—one of the best-known and most culturally significant dinosaurs—in the Iberian fossil record highlights this process in a particularly striking way. From a biogeographical and palaeontological perspective, this is a significant new ‘building block’ in a process we are coming to understand better and better as research progresses. With the addition of Diplodocus to the already known Allosaurus and Stegosaurus, we are assembling the ‘complete set of dinosaur trading cards’ from the 1940s in the United States on the Iberian Peninsula.