Fourteen tail vertebrae found in Spain replaces North America as the only Diplodocus site

Palaeontologists in Spain have discovered the first confirmed Diplodocus fossils outside of North America, marking the first-ever discovery outside the area. For 150 years, every confirmed bone of the animal came from one place, the Morrison Formation of western US. But recently, Sergio Sanchez Fenollosa and his colleagues found the same anatomical signature in a set of tail vertebrae found in Teruel, Spain.The roughly 150-million-year-old remains turned out to be the first confirmed Diplodocus fossils ever found outside North America, the team reported in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology. During the Late Jurassic, falling sea levels may have exposed land that dinosaurs could walk across between the continents. “With each new result, the picture became clearer: we were looking at a Diplodocus,” Sánchez Fenollosa, the study’s lead author, said in a press release.Identifying the first Diplodocus fossilsThe first five vertebrae turned up at La Tejeria back in 2008. It wasn’t until excavations in 2014 and 2015 that the team recovered nine more, along with several chevrons, the bones attached beneath the tail vertebrae. Some of the vertebrae were still connected in the order they...