Diplodocus fossils found in Spain challenge North America’s dinosaur monopoly

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.