Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
A new species of sauropod – or long-necked dinosaur – has been described from fossils found in Spain. The titanosaur has been named Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra in a paper published in Communications Biology.
The dinosaur was discovered at the Lo Hueco fossil site in the central city of Cuenca, about 140km east of Madrid. More than 12,000 fossil fragments have been uncovered there since 2007 during works to install a high-speed train line between Madrid and Levante.
The Qunkasaura partial skeleton is among the most complete titanosaur fossils in Europe.
Recent Iberian Peninsula sauropod discoveries include the massive Garumbatitan morellensis discovered in eastern Spain.
Qunkasaura lived about 75 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period (145–66 million years ago). At that time, Europe was a huge archipelago of tropical islands.
The large dinosaur would have been almost 6m tall. For perspective, a 16-year-old male giraffe named Forest in the breeding program at Australia Zoo is thought to be the tallest living giraffe at 5.7m.
The new fossils belong to a group of sauropods called saltasaurids. These large herbivores are distinguished by their armour including scutes (bony external plates on the skin) which may have provided defence against predators.
“The study of this specimen allowed us to identify for the first time the presence of two distinct lineages of saltasauroids in the same fossil locality,” says study lead Pedro Mocho from the University of Lisbon in Portugal. “One of these groups, called Lirainosaurinae, is relatively known in the Iberian region and is characterised by small and medium-sized species, which evolved in an island ecosystem.”
“However, Qunkasaura belongs to another group of sauropods, represented in the Iberian Peninsula by medium-large species 73 million years ago. This suggests to us that this lineage arrived in the Iberian Peninsula much later than other groups of dinosaurs.”
Lo Hueco is the only place where both families of saltasaurids coexisted. The authors of the new study say that this suggests a new group of titanosaurs called Lohuecosauria which includes members of both lineages. They say that Lohuecosauria may have originated on the southern continents (Gondwana) before dispersing globally including to North America, Europe and Asia (collectively forming the ancient supercontinent Laurasia).
“Fortunately, the Lo Hueco deposit also preserves several skeletons of sauropod dinosaurs to be determined, which may correspond to new species, and which will help us understand how these animals evolved,” Mocho adds.
