12 years ago they found a vertebra from the age of dinosaurs in the Pyrenees: now the latest studies have surprised experts

Researchers from several universities in Spain, Portugal and Argentina were able to describe for the first time a fossil of a giant bird at least 1.5 meters high, found in the Aragonese Pyrenees, which lived with the last dinosaurs in Europe before the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.

The book, published in the international magazine Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, is led by researchers from the Aragosaurus-IUCA group at the Spanish University of Zaragoza (Unizar) and researchers from universities in the Canary Islands, Portugal and Argentina have also collaborated on it, Unizar reported in a press release .

The fossil is a cervical vertebra that exhibits a series of characteristics that allow it to be identified as belonging to a large bird, between 1.5 and 1.8 meters tall, which is said to have a long and flexible neck.

The fossil has been compared to the vertebrae of present and extinct theropod dinosaurs and birds around the world, after which its avian nature has been clearly demonstrated, although more primitive than present day birds., as explained by Manuel Pérez-Pueyo, Aragosaurus-IUCA researcher and main author of the book.

During research development, a computerized axial microtomography (micro CT) of the vertebra was performed in the laboratory of the National Center for Research on Human Evolution in Burgos, to study its internal structure.

The scanner allowed us to observe a hollow structure with multiple cavities and chambers, typical of a respiratory system with air sacs similar to that of modern birds.

the fossil was found in 2009 at the site of Pain, located in the outcrops of continental sedimentary rocks of the Tremp Formation in Aragon, northeastern Spain.

The dates of this zone made in previous works place these rocks in the last 250,000 years of the Cretaceous, temporally very close to the Cretaceous / Paleogene limit and the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs.

According to Unizar, This finding is very relevant to the paleontology of European vertebrates, because although the presence of large birds was known in the Cretaceous of Europe, they had never been recorded so close to the Cretaceous / Paleogene border.

This vertebra is the more modern evidence of a Mesozoic bird in Europe and shows that large birds coexisted with other dinosaurs just before their extinction, which means that the continental animal communities of the late Cretaceous in the Iberian Peninsula were more diverse than what was known until now.

Future findings will help unravel the role this animal played in these ecosystems and its kinship relationships with other birds.

(With information from EFE)

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