A study overseen by Portuguese palaeontologist Pedro Mocho has identified a new species of sauropod dinosaur that lived in Cuenca, Spain, 75 million years ago, the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL) announced today.
The species has been named ‘Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra’ and the work – published in the scientific journal Communication Biology – is the result of analysing one of the thousands of fossils collected during work on the Madrid-Levante high-speed railway line and which today form “one of the most important collections of fossil vertebrates from the Upper Cretaceous in Europe,” from the Lo Hueco deposit in Cuenca.
According to Mocho, a palaeontologist at FCUL’s Dom Luiz Institute, the new species identified belongs to a group of sauropod dinosaurs, which suggests that this medium-large lineage “arrived in the Iberian Peninsula much later than other dinosaur groups.”
