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Two new species of dinosaurs that once lived in the Țara Hațegului (Hátszegi-medence, one of the largest inter-mountain basins in the Carpathian Basin) have been identified by an international team of researchers. One of them is larger than the other fossils before, which casts doubt on the current view of dinosaurs in Transylvania, said Zoltán Csiki-Sava of the University of Bucharest.
The two species now identified by a team of researchers from the University of Bucharest, the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and University College London are named Petrustitan hungaricus and Uriash kadici. They belong to the sauropod dinosaur suborder, the titanosaur family, which were four-legged, long-necked herbivores. In a statement, the University of Bucharest said that the description of the two new species is an important step in the study of the diversity of European dinosaurs that lived 70 million years ago, and provides new information about their living conditions and coexistence. With the two new species the total number of titanosaurs found in the once island-like Țara Hațegului has grown to four.
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The new species are described in a paper published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology. Zoltán Csiki-Sava, a lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Geology and Geophysics of the University of Bucharest, co-author of the study, said that the description of the two new species is important in itself, but what is even more interesting is that Uriash kadici was a large-bodied dinosaur.
The accepted view of the Transylvanian dinosaurs found in the Țara Hațegului is that they were dwarf dinosaurs, and that they had reduced body size, because they were living in an island environment.
“The large herbivores become smaller because there is less habitat and food in the island environment, which encourages the animals to adapt,”
explained Zoltán Csiki-Sava.
He said that the dinosaurs discovered in the region so far fit the island dwarfism pattern, being much smaller than their Western European relatives. The size of the newly described Petrustitan hungaricus (3-4 meters) is also roughly the same as that of the Magyarosaurus dacus found by Ferenc Nopcsa. Uriash kadici, on the other hand, was nearly four times longer and ten times heavier. It was 9-11 meters long and weighed 8-9 tonnes, which is a large size even for a Western European dinosaur. They hypothesized that the reason why the large species did not shrink in size was that dwarf herbivores already lived in the area, so the ecological space for them was saturated.
Zoltán Csiki-Sava added that the researchers had suspected that larger dinosaurs had existed in the region. “We have shown not only that such a large animal existed, but also that over long periods of time, millions of years, the remains of such large animals persist,” underlined the geologist. He recalled that the former island had existed for 7-8 million years, with faunas alternating and all of them containing the large-bodied animal.
According to Zoltán Csíki-Sava, the discovery shows that evolution on the island was more complex than they previously thought. He said their work is a reinterpretation of old discoveries. The remains of Petrustitan hungaricus were discovered by Ferenc Nopcsa before 1906 and described as a new species based on remains in the Natural History Museum in London. Uriash kadici is named after the Croatian-born Hungarian geologist Ottokár Kadic, who excavated in Țara Hațegului between 1909 and 1915 and discovered the bones that are now in the Geological Institute in Budapest. The research team studied them in comparison with other bones and found that they could be described as a new species on the basis of distinct features.
Research in Țara Hațegului is ongoing, and in recent years, together with Hungarian geologists led by Gábor Botfalvai of the Department of Paleontology at ELTE, they have uncovered remains that are still being studied.
“It is possible that new dinosaur species will emerge from this material,”
emphasized Zoltán Csiki-Sava.
Via MTI; Featured picture: Pexels