A total of 12,000 fossils were dug up in the mountains of east-central Spain – but it was this one that stood out…
The skeleton of a dinosaur discovered during works to install the Madrid-Levante train tracks has been described by scientists as an entirely new species.
The skeleton was part of an extraordinary collection of 12,000 fossils unearthed at the Lo Hueco fossil site near the mountain town of Cuenca in Spain from 2007 onwards, but it wasn’t until now that the remains were described.
Palaeontologists have named the new dinosaur species Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra, combining several geographic and cultural references close to the site.
According to a new study, published in the journal Communications Biology, Qunkasaura is one of the most relevant collections of fossil vertebrates from the Upper Cretaceous of Europe.
Qunkasaura lived around 75 million years ago and belonged to a dinosaur family known as the sauropods. These enormous herbivores walked on four legs and had really long necks, a small head and a huge, tapering tail.
Scientists studying the fossils of Qunkasaura found it to have unusual tail bones, which had only ever been seen before in South America.
Their unique morphology, especially in the tail vertebrae, offers new insights into the non-avian dinosaurs of the Iberian Peninsula, a historically poorly understood group, says palaeontologist and lead author of the study Pedro Mocho.
Mocho explains that the name Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra is a combination of the words ‘Qunka’, the oldest etymology of the toponym from the Cuenca and Fuentes area; ‘Saura’, alluding to the feminine of the Latin saurus (lizard), but also paying homage to the painter Antonio Saura; and ‘pintiquiniestra’, a nod to the giant ‘Queen Pintiquiniestra’, who is a character from a novel mentioned in Don Quijote de la Mancha by Cervantes.
Part of the skeleton of Qunkasaura is already on display at the Paleontological Museum of Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca, Spain.
The researchers believe there are still more exciting discoveries to be made at the site.
“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,” concludes Mocho.
Find out more about the study: A Spanish saltasauroid titanosaur reveals Europe as a melting pot of endemic and immigrant sauropods in the Late Cretaceous
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