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Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain sci.news

notoranditan hour ago

According to latest executive order, Spain has been renamed "Spanish Peninsula of America". So Diplodocus keeps being exclusively American.

hackyhacky7 hours ago

> Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain

Another example of quality American production moving overseas. Globalization will be the end of us

shagie4 hours ago

Reunite Pangea! https://thepangeamap.com (you can put Diplodocus on the timeline and see a projection of what the map was then)

higginsniggins13 minutes ago

So according to this map, North America was separated from Spain by a body of water when Diplodocus was alive?

[deleted]2 hours agocollapsed

Maxion2 hours ago

Oh wow! Now that's a cool site!

WCSTombs6 hours ago

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!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemal_arch

thenthenthen5 hours ago

“Diplodocus, Long Thought Extinct, turn up in Spain” yep same here

darylteo4 hours ago

That damned loch ness monster

gus_massa15 hours ago

> 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?

shagie4 hours ago

Else comment I made, trying to answer that same question, I found https://thepangeamap.com - one of the neat features is being able to put dinosaurs in the timeline. The Paleotopography selection (rather than GPlates) also gives hints about the expected height and depth of the land and sea.

artisinal8 hours ago

We could save a lot of money and emissions if we brought the continents back together! Imagine Paris to New York by high speed train.

loloquwowndueo8 hours ago

Ew no, not with the Americans behaving the way they are now. The Atlantic is fine where it is thank you very much.

saghm8 hours ago

As an American...I concur. The rest of the world doesn't deserve that.

aeve8907 hours ago

Americans behaving the way they are now and Parisians mixed together? Hell on Earth

rubidium5 hours ago

I would think so yes. But not an authority on this.

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.

mncharity4 hours ago

> map!

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...

From the TFA paper[3]:

During the early Mesozoic, North America and Europe were connected to form the western and central part of the supercontinent Laurasia. With the opening of the North Atlantic during the Late Jurassic and earliest Cretaceous, the region fragmented into smaller tectonic units55–58 that might have periodically formed contiguous land masses57,58 during sea level low-stands, characterized by exposure of continental margins and draining of continental interior seaways55–58. The presence of a land bridge between North America and Europe during the late Kimmeridgian-earliest Tithonian13 might explain similarities in some dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus59 and Allosaurus60. However, the absence of turiasaurs in the Morrison Formation suggests that this clade dispersed into western North America after the mid-Tithonian. Thus, unless we wish to argue that turiasaurs were actually present in the Morrison Formation but have not been found yet, a second later land connection between Europe and North America is required. Specifically, during the mid-Valanginian (c.137Ma), a dramatic drop in sea level7,55,56 potentially reconnected Europe and North America and so permitted a fi al exchange of vertebrate clades across the Atlantic. Th s Valanginian event could also explain apparent faunal exchanges between these continents proposed for the late Hauterivian-early Barremian13. Taxa that seem to disperse in the Hauterivian/ Barremian might actually have done so during the Valanginian lowstand, but gaps in the fossil record mean that the results of these dispersals might not be detected until we access better sampled post-Valanginian deposits.

58 is available with a plate.[4] 57 is old, with only low-res global plates, ggl books preview has 138 Ma on p42. 56 I skipped. 55 is available[5] but is temporally low res.

There's a 2016 paper Late Mesozoic North Atlantic land bridges[6], Elsevier paywalled with excerpts, and on sci-hub.

And that's my time budget.

[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/ [3] quote is on page 9: https://dinodata.de/bibliothek/pdf_d/2017/001_s41598-017-146... [4] paper ref 58, 150/136 Ma plates on page 31, key on page 29, 3 MB but downloads slowly: https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00117/22805/20913.pdf [5] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Golonka-Jan/publication... [6] Late Mesozoic North Atlantic land bridges (2016). Available on sci-hub. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...

embedding-shapeop3 days ago

Original article (in Spanish), from the source itself: https://fundaciondinopolis.org/un-descubrimiento-paleontolog...

seanhunteran hour ago

How do we know it wasn’t an American diplodocus on a gap year trip to Europe?

ghostDancer21 minutes ago

Probably went one summer to run the bulls in Pamplona.

ta937548294 hours ago

Is "American" a nationality where maybe "North American" a geography? I don't think Diplodocus has US citizenship...

[deleted]4 hours agocollapsed

lukaszkorecki6 hours ago

Diplodocus?

HelloUsername4 minutes ago

* DnB beat drops *

lumi_ilands5 hours ago

[dead]

protocolture5 hours ago

Even the dinosaurs are abandoning the USA.

imp0cat2 hours ago

Back in the day, they migrated away, only to be brought back as diesel fuel today. ;)

Arubis8 hours ago

This probably is the most succinct way to write the title, but assigning nationality to dinosaurs is _weird_.

saghm8 hours ago

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.

Arubis8 hours ago

I think that’s what most tripped me up. “North American” would’ve been clearer here.

soperj6 hours ago

Nah, this is a Yankee/American issue. Citizens of the US claiming a noun that belongs to the continent.

saghm7 hours ago

I honestly had the opposite misreading; I thought it was intentionally trying to say it also had been found in South America, but from some googling I can't find any reference to that. Wikipedia seems to have already been updated to "North America and Europe"

marcosdumay7 hours ago

North and South American dinosaurs were very different.

imp0cat2 hours ago

Yes, and the difference being that they did not build a huge wall between them.

foolswisdom8 hours ago

Maybe in "Iberia" instead of Spain?

loloquwowndueo8 hours ago

Iberia is an airline my dudes. (/s before someone comes correcting me about it)

foobarian7 hours ago

Now here I thought it was the Byzantine Theme in the Caucases

tengbretson5 hours ago

Spoken like someone who's dinosaurs have never been to the moon.

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