Almost everyone has heard of the gigantic Brachiosaurus or Diplodocus dinosaurs, two sauropods from the Late Jurassic. People who are more familiar with dinosaur paleontology will also have read that the largest dinosaurs that have ever existed were Argentinosaurus or Patagotitan , from the Cretaceous of South America. But not so many people are familiar with the fact that at the end of the Jurassic, and in what is now the province of Teruel, lived the largest dinosaur in Europe and one of the largest in the world: Turiasaurus riodevensis . With its discovery and study we learned that this sauropod and some of its relatives formed a family of giants, the Turiasauria.
To start talking about this family of sauropods, we have to travel to the 1980s to a small town in the province of Valencia: Aras de los Olmos. There, a local teacher named Francisco Moreno , who is fond of archeology and paleontology, discovered many deposits. When paleontologists from the University of Valencia and the Sabadell Institute of Paleontology became aware, the experts approached this small town in 1989 to visit the sites found by Moreno.
Visiting the places where Francisco had found isolated bones and teeth, they found just 150 meters away a fragment of the humerus of the sauropod dinosaur that would later be published as Losillasaurus giganteus. The first actions began the same summer of the discovery with the excavation of the humerus. The following year, a work camp continued to be organized in which students from the University participated and during which a large carcass with various bones, including vertebrae and ribs, was extracted. During the following years, from 1991 to 1995, excavations were carried out at the site, and it was then that these findings began to be known and the press echoed their importance.
After the restoration and study of the fossils, they were transferred to Valencia, where since 2001 they can be visited at the Museum of Natural Sciences . That same year, the paleontologists Lourdes Casanovas, José Vicente Santafé and José Luis Sanz published the study and description of this new dinosaur, calling it Losillasaurus giganteus (Losilla’s giant saurian), which at first was considered a relative of Diplodocus .
Barely a year after this publication, in the neighboring province of Teruel, paleontologists from the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis began prospecting (looking for deposits) in the municipality of Riodeva.
In May 2003, paleontologists Rafael Royo-Torres and Alberto Cobos found hundreds of scattered bone fragments in an old labor camp of about 100 m2. The first indications have already shown the great potential of the deposit, which they called Barrihonda-El Humero. The type material for Turiasaurus riodevensis was found at this site. This new sauropod dinosaur was published in the journal Science by Rafael Royo-Torres, Alberto Cobos and Luis Alcalá in 2006. In this publication and as a result of their research results, it was proposed that this new sauropod, together with Losillasaurus , and a sauropod found in the Galve locality, Galvesaurus herreroi , they would form a clade or group of early sauropod dinosaurs called Turiasauria . In addition, the size of Turiasaurus was estimated at more than 30 meters , which would make it the largest dinosaur in Europe – which is why it was nicknamed ” The European Giant ” – and one of the largest in the world. And possibly the largest of its time and the first of the supergiant sauropods.
But these three sauropods from the eastern peninsula were not alone. Later studies proposed to increase this family. For example, eusauropods similar to Turiasaurus could leave traces of ichnites – fossil footprints – from the Galinha site in Portugal. In addition, Turiasaurus teeth have been described in the Portuguese sites of Praia da Corva and Cambelas. The presence of these eusauropods was confirmed some time later with the description of the turiasaur Zby atlanticus , in Lourinha (Portugal). And, on the other hand, among the remains of sauropods from the Tendaguru formation in Tanzania , and which are deposited in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin , several fossil remains very similar to those of Turiasaurus and Losillasaurus were also identified.
Over time, the latest additions to the family have come from further afield. This is the case of Amanzia greppini , from the Upper Jurassic of Switzerland , or Moabosaurus utahensis and Mierasaurus bobyoungi, found in the Lower Cretaceous of Utah, in the United States.
This is how, over time, an apparently local finding in a small town in Valencia has become the first discovery of a whole group of large sauropod dinosaurs , which probably inhabited Europe, Africa and North America, from the Late Jurassic to the Lower Cretaceous. The first giant dinosaurs.
References:
Casanovas, ML et al. 2001. Losillasaurus giganteus , a new sauropod from the Jurassic-Cretaceous transit of the “Los Serranos” basin (Valencia, Spain). Paleontology and Evolution, 32-33: 99-122.
Royo-Torres, R. et al. 2006. A Giant European Dinosaur and a New Sauropod Clade. Science, 314: 1925-1927.
Gascó-Lluna, F. 2015. Functional anatomy of Turiasaurus riodevensis (Dinosauria, Sauropoda). Doctoral Thesis. Autonomous University of Madrid.
Royo-Torres, R. et al. 2017. Descendants of the Jurassic turiasaurs from Iberia found refuge in the Early Cretaceous of western USA. Scientific Reports, 7: 14311.
