Teruel's Diplodocus puts Europe back in the Morrison's Jurassic room

14 tail bones that had no European address

You can walk into the dinosaur hall in Teruel and look at 14 caudal vertebrae that, until this week, had no confirmed European address. The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology published the La Tejería specimen from El Castellar: a diplodocid close to Diplodocus hallorum, about 25 metres long, from rocks about 150 million years old. Every confirmed Diplodocus until now had come from the Morrison Formation in the western United States.^[1]

The Fundación Dinópolis team reads that placement as evidence that Late Jurassic dinosaurs could move between North America and Europe when the proto-Atlantic briefly offered land during regressive phases. They are arguing from anatomy. A similar diplodocine body plan could still have originated separately in Europe.^[1]

The map that museum casts taught you

Once a genus filed under an American silhouette sits in eastern Iberia, the provincial Late Jurassic map starts to look like a habit of our halls. Diplodocus casts have stood worldwide since the early twentieth century as a North American animal; the El Castellar animal puts Turiasaurus, Losillasaurus and a diplodocid on the same shoreline. The Teruel tail asks you to treat the proto-Atlantic as a door that could open, keeping the Morrison Formation and eastern Iberia in one faunal room.^{[1], [2]}

The same rocks have already given theropods, stegosaurs and ornithopods. The new specimen adds the long-tailed silhouette to a shoreline that was already busy.^[1]

One room, at a different scale

Five thousand three hundred years ago, plague genomes showed Scandinavia and northern China already sharing one contact network across more than 7,500 kilometres. That earlier column asked you to stop drawing prehistoric Eurasia as a scatter of sealed rooms.^[2]

The Teruel tail does the same job at a different scale. The next European diplodocine skeleton with the same anatomical marks is the observable test of a crossing versus a rare visitor. Either way the Morrison-only map is already too small for this Teruel specimen.^{[1], [2]}