• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

New Species Of Titanosaur Found In Spain Dates Back 72 Million Years

September 4, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

It’s a good day for palaeontology fans as a team of scientists have announced the discovery of a new species of dinosaur. The fossils retrieved in Spain belonged to a titanosaur, the long-necked giants, and is between 70 to 75 million years old.

The prehistoric giant’s partial skeleton was found at the Lo Hueco fossil site in Cuenca, Spain. Its discovery inspired its name, Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra, which refers to Cuenca, the Spanish painter Antonio Saura, and Queen Pintiquiniestra who was a character from the 16th century book Amadis of Greece that features in the 17th century novel Don Quixote.

“Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra is a sauropod dinosaur, which corresponds to a group of herbivorous and quadrupedal dinosaurs,” explained lead author Pedro Mocho of the University of Lisbon, Portugal, to IFLScience.

“Sauropods are characterized by their long necks and tails, columnar limbs, and small head relative to their body size. In particular, Qunkasaura belongs to a group of sauropods named Titanosauria, and some members of these groups are featured by the presence of osteoderms, which partially covered their skin.”

The excavation of Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra at Lo Hueco.

The excavation of Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra at Lo Hueco.

Image credit: GBE-UNED

Titanosaurs are the only sauropods to have this dermal armor, and while they’re a relatively rare find, several have come from the Lo Hueco fossil site.   

From the fossilized skeleton, the authors were also able to identify some skeletal features that are unique to Qunkasaura. These included bony projections on its neck bones and a hook-shaped thing sticking off the base of its spine.

This is the first time we discovered two distinct lineages of saltasauroids in the same fossil locality.

Pedro Mocho

Curiously, its tail shares a characteristic seen in a group of titanosaurs known as the aeolosaurines, which wouldn’t be so strange if it wasn’t that these dinosaurs are found way over in South America. The evolutionary relationships between Qunkasaura and aeolosaurines don’t show any relation, so it could be that this is a kind of convergent evolution where a shared skeletal feature has evolved independently in different lineages.

More locally, Qunkasaura joins the opisthocoelicaudine saltasaurids, a group of dinosaurs found on Laurasia, which is the ancient supercontinent that eventually split up to create North America, Europe, and Asia. Their close proximity to other dinosaurs like the lirainosaurines is reflected in the fossil diversity at Lo Hueco, and provides further insight into the evolution of European titanosaurs.

Size comparison for Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra with some colorful characters.

Size comparison for Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra with some colorful characters.

Image credit: GBE-UNED

“This is the first time we discovered two distinct lineages of saltasauroids in the same fossil locality,” added Mocho. “One of these groups named Lirainosaurinae is relatively well-known in the Iberian region, and they are characterized by species of small and medium size, which evolved in an insular ecosystem, i.e., Europe was a huge archipelago composed by several islands during the Late Cretaceous.”

“However, Qunkasaura belongs to another group of sauropods, which is represented in the Iberian Peninsula by medium-large sized species 73 million years ago. This suggests to us that they reached the Iberian Peninsula much later than other groups of dinosaurs.”

Advertisement

The study is published in Communications Biology.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Bolivian president calls for global debt relief for poor countries
  2. Five Seasons Ventures pulls in €180M fund to tackle human health and climate via FoodTech
  3. Humanity’s Journey To A Metal-Rich Asteroid Launches Today. Here’s How To Watch
  4. Ancient DNA Reveals People Caught Leprosy From Adorable Woodland Critters In Medieval England

Source Link: New Species Of Titanosaur Found In Spain Dates Back 72 Million Years

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Why Do Many Large Language Models Give The Same Answer To This “Random” Number Query?
  • Adidas Jabulani: The World Cup Football So Bad NASA Decided To Study It
  • Beluga Whales Shake Their Blob-Like Melons To Say Hello And Even Woo A Mate, But How?
  • Gravitational Wave Detected From Largest Black Hole Merger Yet: “It Presents A Real Challenge To Our Understanding Of Black Hole Formation”
  • At Over 100 Years Of Age, The World’s Oldest Elephant Passes Away In India
  • Ancient Human DNA Reveals Earliest Zoonotic Diseases Appeared 6,500 Years Ago
  • Boys Are Better At Math? That Could Be Because School Favors Them Over Girls
  • Looptail G: Most People Can’t Recognize A Letter You Have Seen Millions Of Times
  • 24-Million-Year-Old Protein Fragments Are Oldest Ever Recovered, A Robot Listened To Spoken Instructions And Performed Surgery, And Much More This Week
  • DNA From Greenland Sled Dogs – Maybe The World’s Oldest Breed – Reveals 1,000 Years Of Arctic History
  • Why Doesn’t Moonrise Shift By The Same Amount Each Night?
  • Moa De-Extinction, Fashionable Chimps, And Robot Surgery – No Human Required
  • “Human”: Powerful New Images Mark The Most Scientifically Accurate “Hyper-Real 3D Models Of Human Species Ever”
  • Did We Accidentally Leave Life On The Moon In 2019 – And Could We Revive It?
  • 1.8 Million Years Ago, Two Extinct Humans Had One Of The Gnarliest Deaths In History
  • “Powerful Image” Of One Of The World’s Rarest Tigers Exposes The Real Danger In Taman Negara
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version