A large part of the teeth of one of the last giant dinosaurs in the Pyrenees mountain range has been reconstructed.
Titanosaurs are a group of sauropod dinosaurs (characterized by having a small head, long neck and tail, and columnar legs similar to those of an elephant). They are the last group known to have lived in Europe during the Late Cretaceous, the last period before the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and include the largest known dinosaurs, such as Patagotitan mayorum, the animal largest terrestrial that has ever existed.
The authors of the study are from the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology, the Museu de la Conca Dellà and the Dinópolis Foundation, in Spain.
The teeth studied are the most complete in Europe assigned to a single individual of these last giant dinosaurs. The discovery was made at the Els Nerets site (Vilamitjana, Pallars Jussà, Catalonia), one of the most important in the Conca de Tremp and with an age of about 70 million years. The teeth were not in anatomical position, but disarticulated. Despite this, as they are found scattered around a titanosaur skull, researchers believe that they belong to this animal.
It is a collection of 18 teeth with conical and slender crowns, with a marked development of the mesial and distal carinae, that is, the pointed ridges that run along the side of the tooth, as if it were the blade of a spear. Although they are designed to cut plant matter like pruning shears, they would be much blunter than those of carnivorous dinosaurs. The characteristics and shape of the teeth indicate that the dinosaur from which they came does not resemble any of the titanosaur species found in Europe, although they have the characteristics that define the teeth of this group. It could therefore be a species of titanosaur new to science.
By comparing them to each other, researchers have discovered something unusual. Although generally the teeth in the mouth of the same dinosaur look quite similar (compared to ours, for example), in this case differences have been observed. “As they all correspond to the same individual, we think that the differences are due to the position they occupy in the mouth, as happens with mammals, which can have incisors or molars of very different shapes,” explains Bernat Vázquez, paleontologist in the group of research in Dinosaur Ecosystems at the ICP and first signatory of the study. “In this case, however, the differences are not so extreme, since all the teeth have the same function,” concludes the researcher.
The research has allowed us to develop a method to determine the position in the mouth of any titanosaur tooth that can be found in isolation in the field. This represents a very significant advance, since until now it was considered that loose teeth provided little information and were often not taken into account beyond merely descriptive aspects. By applying this method, the researchers have been able to reconstruct the position of the teeth found and thus obtain a large part of the original dental configuration of the animal with a view to future studies.
Although everything seems to indicate that the teeth belong to a new species still unknown to science, we cannot be certain until the skull and other elements of the skeleton found at the same site have been studied.
Bernat Vázquez and Bernat Vila, co-authors of the research, are paleontologists from the ICP and the Museu de la Conca Dellà. The team also includes Diego Castanera, researcher at the Teruel-Dinopolis Paleontological Complex Foundation.
The dinosaurs of the Pyrenees, the last in Europe
The discovery is another example of the exceptional fossil record of dinosaurs in Catalonia. In the different sites of the Pyrenees there is evidence of the last dinosaurs that lived in Europe, a few million and even thousands of years before their extinction throughout the planet. The fossils they provide are the main field of study for paleontologists, while at the same time they represent an inexhaustible source of content for the interpretation centers and museums in the area that disseminate a unique paleontological heritage. The interest in Pyrenean dinosaurs lies in the fact that they are the last groups of dinosaurs recorded in Europe and, therefore, provide a lot of information about the ecosystems before the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.
The study is titled “Titanosaur teeth from the South-central Pyrenees (Upper Cretaceous, Catalonia, Spain). And it has been published in the academic journal Cretaceous Research.
(Source: ICP)
Fuente: www.noticiasdelaciencia.com