Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Fourteen tail vertebrae from Teruel put Diplodocus in Europe for the first time
Paleontologists at Fundación Dinópolis have assigned a partial tail from El Castellar, Spain, to Diplodocus, a genus known until now only from the Morrison Formation. Its closest known relative is a Morrison species.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Researchers from the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis report in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology the first evidence of Diplodocus found outside North America.
- The material is 14 well-preserved caudal vertebrae and several chevron bones, dug out over time at the La Tejería site in El Castellar, Teruel, in eastern Spain.
- Every confirmed Diplodocus specimen before this one came from a single unit, the Morrison Formation of the western United States.
- Co-author Alberto Cobos, managing director of Fundación Dinópolis, said the El Castellar animal was about 25 metres long, comparable in size to its North American relatives.
- The bones are now in the dinosaur hall of the Museo Aragonés de Paleontología at Dinópolis in Teruel, available for study and public viewing.
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Why it matters
- constraint One partial tail from one site records a presence in Iberia at the end of the Jurassic. Which way animals crossed the proto-Atlantic, and how many times, is not something a single specimen can decide.
- capability European Jurassic sauropod work now has a genus shared with the Morrison Formation, so Iberian diplodocid material can be compared against a North American standard instead of being left at family level.
- precedent Because the diagnosis runs on caudal and chevron characters, museum drawers holding isolated diplodocid tails elsewhere in Europe become candidates for the same test.
- contradiction The paper calls a partial tail one of the most complete diplodocid skeletons in Europe. That caps how much comparative material any reviewer of the claim has to work with.
The assignment rests on four features of the tail bones: large pneumatic cavities in the vertebrae, deep longitudinal grooves along their undersides, forked chevrons with distinctive medial fossae, and elongated centra without lateral ridges [4]. Anatomical comparison on its own leaves room to argue. So the team also ran two phylogenetic analyses that make different assumptions about how character change accumulates, maximum parsimony and Bayesian inference, and both placed the specimen inside Diplodocus as a close relative of Diplodocus hallorum [5]. "Then, as we carried out different evolutionary analyses, they kept pointing in the same direction," said Sergio Sanchez Fenollosa, the Fundación Dinópolis doctoral student who led the study [19].
The sister-taxon result is what makes this more than a range extension. Diplodocus hallorum is itself known from Morrison material [16], so the closest relative of an Iberian animal sits in the western United States. The paper's explanation is geography: dinosaurs could move between the two continents in the Late Jurassic, most likely over temporary land bridges exposed when the proto-North Atlantic went through regressive phases [9]. The Spanish specimen dates to roughly 150 million years ago [6].
Sanchez Fenollosa said: "And what is more, the outcome of the dig is some of the strongest paleontological evidence for episodes of dispersal and faunal exchange between the two continents across the proto-Atlantic Ocean during the Late Jurassic" [8]. The land bridges themselves come from the sea-level record [9].
The authors call this partial tail one of the most complete diplodocid skeletons ever found in Europe [7]. Fourteen vertebrae and some chevrons clearing that bar is a measure of how little diplodocid material Europe has produced.
Diplodocus has been known from American bones since 1878 [13]. The report confirming it on a second continent is dated September 2026 [14], about 148 years later [15].
What to watch
- Whether an independent reanalysis of the character matrix keeps the El Castellar specimen inside Diplodocus or moves it to a broader diplodocine position.
- Whether further digging at La Tejería yields more of the skeleton, including material outside the tail.
- Whether isolated diplodocid tail material already in European collections gets reassigned to Diplodocus on the same characters.