Paleontologists in Spain Found the First Diplodocus Ever Discovered Outside North America

The famous long-necked dinosaur may even have had a European species.

Europe may have just gotten one, folks!

Fourteen bones from the middle of a diplodocus’s tail have pushed one of the world’s most famous dinosaurs across the Atlantic.

At the La Tejería fossil site near El Castellar in eastern Spain, paleontologists recovered 14 tail vertebrae and a collection of V-shaped bones called chevrons, which hung beneath the tail. The site was discovered in 2008, when five vertebrae were collected; excavations in 2014 and 2015 yielded nine more.

The researchers describe the animal as Diplodocus sp., a roughly 150-million-year-old member of a genus that, until now, had been confidently known only from the Morrison Formation of the western United States. If the identification holds, it would be the first documented evidence of Diplodocus outside North America.

The specimen has no skull, no neck, and no limbs. What survives is essentially a run of bones from the middle and rear of the tail. Paradoxically, that still makes it one of the most complete diplodocid specimens found in Europe, where fossils from this family are unusually scarce.

Yet the team argues those bones contain enough anatomical clues to identify the dinosaur as Diplodocus—while leaving a bigger question open: was it one of the known North American species, a European one, or a distinct species altogether?

TAILing the Evidence

The researchers placed the vertebrae at roughly positions 22 through 35 in the animal’s tail. Several features narrowed the possibilities for which dinosaurs they belong to. The bones are unusually elongated and have deep grooves along their undersides. They lack ridges seen in some related sauropods, while one vertebra preserves a large depression associated with the animal’s air-sac system. The sauropod’s forked chevrons carried distinctive hollows on their inner surfaces.

The team coded 23 features preserved in the Spanish specimen into a larger data set containing 489 anatomical characters across 36 dinosaur taxa. They then tested its relationships using several evolutionary analyses. Despite differences elsewhere in the resulting family trees, every analysis placed the Spanish animal within Diplodocus and as the closest relative, or “sister,” of Diplodocus hallorum.

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“With each new result, the picture became clearer,” lead author Sergio Sánchez Fenollosa said in a statement. “We were looking at a Diplodocus.”

But the authors stopped at the genus.

Given that the researchers found only middle and posterior tail bones, they could not securely assign the animal to a particular species. They therefore classified it simply as Diplodocus sp. Sánchez Fenollosa told Live Science that more complete fossils will be needed to determine whether the European animal belonged to a North American species or “a previously unknown species.”

But not everyone considers the identification settled.

“The fact that the material is compatible with this genus does not imply that it belongs to it,” Fabien Knoll of Spain’s National Museum of Natural Sciences, who was not involved in the research, told Science Media Centre Spain. He cautioned that further fieldwork and analysis are required to call it Diplodocus. The fossils could very well belong to Supersaurus, Dinheirosaurus, or a different genus, he said.

Jurassic Crossing

If the identification holds, its importance extends far beyond one dinosaur.

Diplodocus had previously been a distinctly North American genus. But Europe and North America were much closer during the Late Jurassic, as the Atlantic was still opening. Paleontologists have long suspected that temporary land connections allowed animals to move between the two regions.

A 2007 study of Stegosaurus fossils from Portugal, for example, reported the first uncontroversial Stegosaurus outside North America and argued for episodic contact across the proto-Atlantic around the same period. Other Late Jurassic genera, including Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus and Torvosaurus, have also been reported from both North America and Iberia.

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A 2016 review of Late Mesozoic North Atlantic land bridges proposed that an ephemeral connection between eastern North America and Iberia existed roughly 154 to 151 million years ago—remarkably close to the age of the Spanish Diplodocus.

The authors estimate the animal reached about 25 meters (82 feet), comparable to its American relatives. Its discovery also adds to an unusually diverse collection of giant sauropods from Teruel, including Turiasaurus and Losillasaurus.

Museum casts made Diplodocus a global dinosaur more than a century ago. Fourteen tail vertebrae now suggest the real animal got much farther from home than paleontologists once knew.

The study was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.