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Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain

104 points · 62 comments · embedding-shape

gus_massa · 1789662695 · focus · HN ↗
> The Spanish Diplodocus lived roughly 150 million years ago near the end of the Jurassic period.
> [...]
> According to the team, the presence of Diplodocus in Iberia offers strong evidence that dinosaurs moved between North America and Europe during that era, likely crossing temporary land bridges that appeared as the proto-North Atlantic Ocean periodically receded.
I want a map! I found this: <a href="https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/167017/view" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/167017/view Is it the correct map? Is there a land (ice?) bridge between Newfoundland and Portugal? Am I interpreting it correctly?
1. artisinal · 1789686407 · focus · HN ↗
  We could save a lot of money and emissions if we brought the continents back together! Imagine Paris to New York by high speed train.
  1. loloquwowndueo · 1789686808 · focus · HN ↗
    Ew no, not with the Americans behaving the way they are now. The Atlantic is fine where it is thank you very much.
    saghm · 1789688603 · focus · HN ↗
    As an American...I concur. The rest of the world doesn't deserve that.
    aeve890 · 1789690638 · focus · HN ↗
    Americans behaving the way they are now and Parisians mixed together? Hell on Earth
    criddell · 1789734715 · focus · HN ↗
    During the world cup, I saw mostly very positive reports on the experiences Europeans had with Americans, and vice versa.
    artisinal · 1789737244 · focus · HN ↗
    Hello, you are going against the internet narrative of "america bad" please stop doing that.
    loloquwowndueo · 1789743052 · focus · HN ↗
    Look for reports from the Iranian team. I bet those weren’t as widely publicized as the rosy positive ones.
    criddell · 1789747188 · focus · HN ↗
    Iran isn't usually described as European and I did qualify my statement with mostly.
    loloquwowndueo · 1789777964 · focus · HN ↗
    I know it’s not European. Great job missing my point entirely.
    criddell · 1790008039 · focus · HN ↗
    If you thought I was claiming everybody had a great time, then you are a missing my point.
    afavour · 1789750549 · focus · HN ↗
    Nice on a personal level in real life but not when dealing with a population in the abstract? Say it ain’t so!
    saghm · 1789753533 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, I have very positive interactions with people outside of the US, and (hopefully!) most of them would say the same about me. That doesn't mean that what my government is doing isn't really shitty though, or that I would expect the other 350 million people around me to be uniformly positive to interact with. For starters, a lot of them voted for the government that's being like this, and although that doesn't necessarily mean that they would interact poorly with people from countries that are having to deal with the fallout, I wouldn't blame someone for not wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt, or even not wanting to give me the benefit of the doubt (I can't prove how I voted, and even if I could, it wouldn't be unreasonable for that to be considered insufficient for exculpability).
    My honest impression is that most of the time when governments are at odds, the people living in the countries will often not share those sentiments when interacting at an individual level. During the brief period when TikTok was unavailable in the US (before the ban kept repeatedly getting pushed until they finalized Ellison et. al. acquiring the US rights for it), a lot of people apparently went onto a Chinese social media app as a silly form of rebellion, with both sides basically agreeing the whole thing was silly and that even they their governments thought they were enemies, the citizens didn't have to.
    pvaldes · 1789738031 · focus · HN ↗
    Foux da fa faa...
    artisinal · 1789740325 · focus · HN ↗
    Fair.
    Perhaps we can extend the Black Sea to keep those dirty Russians out of Europe
2. rubidium · 1789698364 · focus · HN ↗
  I would think so yes. But not an authority on this.
  The map is super cool though. Makes you think of the earth as something still aging since it looks clearly “earth” but with major differences.
3. shagie · 1789700488 · focus · HN ↗
  Else comment I made, trying to answer that same question, I found <a href="https://thepangeamap.com" rel="nofollow">https://thepangeamap.com - one of the neat features is being able to put dinosaurs in the timeline. The Paleotopography selection (rather than GPlates) also gives hints about the expected height and depth of the land and sea.
4. mncharity · 1789701087 · focus · HN ↗
  > map!
  Maps.[1][2]
  Too far south for an ice bridge - Newfoundland is south like modern Florida - tropical. And it's the Jurassic, hot with high sea levels, so even though its continental shelf extends out towards Spain, there are no ice ages to bare it (as was the Eastern US shelf a mere 12k years ago). But Pangea is ripping apart, it's a mess with crust blocks variously uplifted and tilted, massive weathering and sediment fluxes, so...
  From the TFA paper[3]:
  During the early Mesozoic, North America and Europe were connected to form the western and central part of the supercontinent Laurasia. With the opening of the North Atlantic during the Late Jurassic and earliest Cretaceous, the region fragmented into smaller tectonic units55–58 that might have periodically formed contiguous land masses57,58 during sea level low-stands, characterized by exposure of continental margins and draining of continental interior seaways55–58. The presence of a land bridge between North America and Europe during the late Kimmeridgian-earliest Tithonian13 might explain similarities in some dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus59 and Allosaurus60. However, the absence of turiasaurs in the Morrison Formation suggests that this clade dispersed into western North America after the mid-Tithonian. Thus, unless we wish to argue that turiasaurs were actually present in the Morrison Formation but have not been found yet, a second later land connection between Europe and North America is required. Specifically, during the mid-Valanginian (c.137Ma), a dramatic drop in sea level7,55,56 potentially reconnected Europe and North America and so permitted a fi al exchange of vertebrate clades across the Atlantic. Th s Valanginian event could also explain apparent faunal exchanges between these continents proposed for the late Hauterivian-early Barremian13. Taxa that seem to disperse in the Hauterivian/ Barremian might actually have done so during the Valanginian lowstand, but gaps in the fossil record mean that the results of these dispersals might not be detected until we access better sampled post-Valanginian deposits.
  58 is available with a plate.[4] 57 is old, with only low-res global plates, ggl books preview has 138 Ma on p42. 56 I skipped. 55 is available[5] but is temporally low res.
  There's a 2016 paper Late Mesozoic North Atlantic land bridges[6], Elsevier paywalled with excerpts, and on sci-hub.
  And that's my time budget.
  [1] <a href="https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=topo_recon" rel="nofollow">https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=topo_recon [2] rocks: <a href="https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GeologyR" rel="nofollow">https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GeologyR key: <a href="https://portal.gplates.org/portal/geology/" rel="nofollow">https://portal.gplates.org/portal/geology/ [3] quote is on page 9: <a href="https://dinodata.de/bibliothek/pdf_d/2017/001_s41598-017-14677-2_dd.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://dinodata.de/bibliothek/pdf_d/2017/001_s41598-017-146... [4] paper ref 58, 150/136 Ma plates on page 31, key on page 29, 3 MB but downloads slowly: <a href="https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00117/22805/20913.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00117/22805/20913.pdf [5] <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Golonka-Jan/publication/223212026_Phanerozoic_paleogeography_paleoenvironment_and_lithofacies_maps_of_the_circum-Atlantic_margins/links/5a7347a4458515512077bbc3/Phanerozoic-paleogeography-paleoenvironment-and-lithofacies-maps-of-the-circum-Atlantic-margins.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Golonka-Jan/publication... [6] Late Mesozoic North Atlantic land bridges (2016). Available on sci-hub. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825216300794" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...

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