Scientists find a new titanosaur dinosaur species in Patagonia
In Northern Patagonia, paleontologists have unearthed an ancient lagoon ecosystem surrounded by sand dunes and palm trees where prehistoric creatures thrived. Excavations of 78 million year-old rocks, from a quarry just outside General Roca city in Argentina, yielded a treasure trove of 432 fossils belonging to over a hundred animal groups.
The majority of the fossils belonged to turtles, but other residents were fish, crocodile relatives, slugs—including the first fossil record of the Neocyclotidae, a family of tropical land snails, and the first record of Leptinaria, a genus of small tropical air-breathing land snails—and dinosaurs.
The most important find among them all: a new titanosaur called Chadititan calvoi.
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Though researchers have known the Anacleto rock formation where the fossils were discovered for decades, there had never been a finding with such diversity in a single place in Northern Patagonia, says coauthor Diego Pol, a paleontologist at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia in Buenos Aires and a National Geographic Explorer. Today, the team of Argentinian and Uruguayan researchers published their findings on the new titanosaur and the site in Revista del Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales.
'The fossil fauna there is diverse, and our understanding of Southern Hemisphere ecosystems from near the end of the Age of Dinosaurs is still very incomplete,' says paleontologist Matthew Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh who was not involved in the research.
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