Reacción a "What is believed to be the first diplodocus found outside North America has been discovered in Teruel"

The discovery of this new specimen of a sauropod dinosaur is of great importance for gaining a better understanding of the terrestrial ecosystems of the Iberian Peninsula during the Late Jurassic, approximately 145 million years ago. Although the specimen found in Teruel is fragmentary, it retains sufficient information to attribute it with a fair degree of certainty to the genus Diplodocus. This is the first time we have been able to confirm, with a reasonable degree of certainty, the presence of Diplodocus on the Iberian Peninsula, a genus known chiefly for occurring in rocks of the same age on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

This is undoubtedly one of the most significant aspects of this research. The find demonstrates the presence of the same genus of sauropod dinosaurs on both sides of the Atlantic at a time when the Iberian Peninsula and North America were geographically closer and separated by shallower seas. The discovery adds to the list of other dinosaur genera known to have inhabited both regions during the Late Jurassic, such as the theropods Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus and Torvosaurus, and the stegosaur Stegosaurus. The latter was a herbivorous dinosaur characterised by the enormous bony plates running along its back and the long spines at the tip of its tail.

The presence of Diplodocus in Teruel also supports recent suggestions by other researchers regarding the existence of a sauropod very closely related to this genus, Diplodocus, in the Upper Jurassic rocks of Portugal. All of this is particularly interesting because it allows us to understand that the sauropod faunas of the Upper Jurassic on the Iberian Peninsula were much more similar to those inhabiting North America than we had previously imagined. In particular, they bear significant similarities to the sauropod faunas of the Morrison Formation, one of the best-known geological formations of the Upper Jurassic in North America.

It is very satisfying to see that new discoveries, such as this specimen from Teruel, are providing us with the information needed to reconstruct the history and connections between the dinosaur faunas that lived on both sides of the Atlantic some 145 million years ago.