An Italian fishing village near the Slovenian border has provided a wealth of Cretaceous creatures, including dinosaurs, crustaceans and crocodile ancestors. The paleontological team says that the fossil trove tells a different story about the ancient Mediterranean than what was previously thought.
The site is a quarry in Villaggio del Pescatore, a northeastern Italian city. Dinosaurs were first found there in the 1980s, and in the years since, more and more fossils have come out of the rock. The stone in the quarry is difficult to work with as heavy machinery is required to remove the fossils from the stone and then special acid baths are needed to dissolve the rock around the bones. Despite these challenges, paleontologists have now been able to analyze a number of these fossils in depth.
The dinosaurs from the site so far are all Tethyshadros insularis, a species of hadrosaur. Hadrosaurs were herbivores and are commonly known as duck-beaked dinosaurs. The species was named 15 years ago, but until now the general thinking was that the animals lived about 70 million years ago and were relatively small, based on the complete individual previously excavated.
The new research reverses that manuscript, based on the coverage of at least seven and possibly 11 other people. The new fossil evidence indicates that the animals lived about 10 million years earlier and grew much larger. The highlight of the new bone box is a large and well-preserved specimen, the research team named Bruno, which overwhelms the first dinosaur found at the site, nicknamed Antonio. The team’s research is published in Scientific Reports.
“The newly prepared and studied skeleton, Bruno, appears to be larger and more massive than the first, and analyzes from histology show that while the first, smaller individual was a young, it was larger older,” lead author Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza , a paleontologist at the University of Vigo in Spain, told Gizmodo in an email.
The exact age of the huge fossil deposit is still unknown. The age of the deposit would change the interpretations of the place, for in the late Cretaceous various stretches of land around what was then the Tethys Sea were about to emerge, be connected, and dive down. The age of the fossils would indicate when the land that is now Villaggio del Pescatore was actually habitable.
Before, Chiarenza said, consensus was it T. insularis was a product of the island effect, whereby small animals on islands will develop into larger sizes, while large animals may develop into smaller ones. (Komodo dragons in Indonesia and dwarf elephants in Malta during the Pleistocene are two such examples.) The discovery of larger dinosaurs indicates that Antonio was not a small adult hadrosaur, but a normal-sized juvenile.
With several data points for the species in hand, the researchers also compared it with other hadrosaurs. This analysis indicated that the animal was not the miniature offspring previously thought.
“There’s still an extra skeleton waiting to be dug up at the site, Zdravko, which could potentially be even larger than Antonio and look subcomplete,” Chiarenza said. “We also have many other animals preserved on the site, from pterosaurs, to crustaceans, to crocodiles, to fish and plants, so we hope that some kind of different dinosaur, perhaps a complete theropod, can soon be discovered from the site.”
Although other dinosaurs do not show up, the various specimens in this quarry provide paleontologists plenty to study in the coming years.
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