Remains of Europe's oldest dinosaur found in Catalunya
Friday, November 29, 2019 @ 9:18 AM
DINOSAURS may have reached Europe 275,000 years earlier than initially believed, according to historians studying fossils recently found in the Pyrénées of Catalunya.
What is thought to be the first-ever Lambeosaurine Hadrosaurus on the European continent has been dug up in the Els Nerets archaeological dig in Tremp, in the land-locked province of Lleida.
Researchers from the Miquel Crusafont Catalunya Palaeontology Institute (ICP) and the Conca Dellà Museum (MCD) say Lambeosaurine dinosaurs are recognisable by the large, prominent crest on the heads, which they used for communicating with each other.
The crest is hollow, and probably played a major rôle in sexual competition due to its highly-visual nature – like a peacock's feathers or a lion's mane – and it is also thought that in certain species of dinosaur, it acted as a kind of satellite to amplify the sounds the creature made.
According to the report on the finding, published in the magazine Cretaceous Research, what are now the Pyrénées, mainland Spain, Portugal and part of France formed a huge island – referred to by prehistoric experts as the 'Ibero-Armorican Island' – around 69 million years ago, during the Maastrichtian era.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com