The fossil material was unearthed at the La Tejería site in El Castellar, in the province of Teruel, an region that has become one of Europe’s most productive windows into Mesozoic life. Over the course of careful excavation, the team recovered fourteen exceptionally preserved caudal vertebrae, the bones of the dinosaur’s tail, along with several chevron bones, the small paired elements that hang beneath the tail vertebrae and help protect blood vessels and support musculature. Although skull material and limb bones were not part of the recovered assemblage, the quality and diagnostic character of the tail bones proved sufficient for the researchers to make a confident identification at the genus level, something rarely achievable with fragmentary sauropod remains.

Sergio Sánchez Fenollosa, a PhD student in biodiversity and evolutionary biology at Fundación Dinópolis and lead author of the study, described the slow accumulation of evidence that led the team to their conclusion. From the earliest stages of the osteological study, he explained, the researchers noticed strong similarities between the Spanish bones and several diplodocine sauropods. As the anatomical work progressed, they began to identify a combination of features characteristic of Diplodocus species, and subsequent evolutionary analyses repeatedly pointed in the same direction. With each new result, he said, the picture became clearer: the team was looking at a Diplodocus. He added that the outcome of the dig represents some of the strongest palaeontological evidence yet found for episodes of dispersal and faunal exchange between North America and Europe across the proto-Atlantic Ocean during the Late Jurassic, and that the discovery allows a better understanding of Iberian Mesozoic ecosystems and the diversity of sauropod dinosaurs that inhabited the European Jurassic.

The identification rested on a suite of distinctive anatomical features preserved in the vertebrae and chevrons. The tail bones display large pneumatic cavities, air-filled spaces that lightened the skeleton in these colossal animals, a hallmark of many sauropod lineages but expressed in a particularly characteristic form in Diplodocus. The underside of the tail vertebrae bears deep longitudinal grooves, and the chevron bones are distinctly forked, with unique medial fossae, depressions on their inner surfaces, that match the condition seen in North American Diplodocus material. The vertebral centra, the main cylindrical bodies of the vertebrae, are elongated and lack the lateral ridges found in many related diplodocids. Taken together, this combination of traits distinguished the Spanish specimen from other European diplodocids and aligned it with the Diplodocus lineage.

To test the anatomical assessment rigorously, the research team combined traditional comparative anatomy with advanced phylogenetic analyses, employing both maximum parsimony and Bayesian inference methods. These computational approaches evaluate how anatomical characters are distributed across known taxa to reconstruct evolutionary relationships. In both analytical frameworks, the Spanish specimen was confidently placed within the genus Diplodocus, and more specifically as a close relative of Diplodocus hallorum, one of the largest and longest species within the genus. The convergence of anatomical and statistical evidence is what gives the identification its strength, since isolated tail vertebrae can be notoriously difficult to assign to a precise genus among the many similar diplodocid sauropods known from the Late Jurassic.

The Spanish Diplodocus dates to approximately 150 million years ago, near the end of the Jurassic Period, a time that corresponds closely with the age of the Morrison Formation faunas in North America. Its presence in Europe provides compelling evidence that dinosaurs could migrate between the two landmasses during the Late Jurassic. The most likely mechanism, according to the researchers, involved temporary land bridges that emerged as the proto-North Atlantic Ocean underwent regressive phases, periods in which sea levels fell and exposed connections between now-separated continental areas. Such episodic corridors would have allowed herds of giant herbivores, and presumably the predators and smaller animals that followed them, to move between North America and Europe, explaining how a genus once thought to be endemic to the American West could appear on the Iberian Peninsula.

Co-author Dr Alberto Cobos, managing director of Fundación Dinópolis, emphasized the sheer scale of the animal. The Diplodocus from El Castellar was approximately 25 meters long, comparable in size to its North American relatives, making it another of the giant sauropods of the Spanish Jurassic. He noted that it joins other enormous sauropod dinosaurs from Teruel with very different characteristics from those of diplodocids, such as Turiasaurus and Losillasaurus, among others. The fossils of all these dinosaurs, including those of the new Diplodocus specimen, he said, make Teruel a reference place for understanding this great diversity. The coexistence of a diplodocid giant alongside turiasaurian sauropods of entirely different build suggests that Late Jurassic Iberian ecosystems supported multiple niches for gigantic herbivores, perhaps with the different lineages specializing in different vegetation or feeding heights.

The broader fossil record of the region reinforces that picture of ecological richness. The area where the specimen was found has yielded numerous dinosaur fossils representing sauropods, theropods, stegosaurs, and ornithopods, indicating that these ancient coastal environments supported complex and diverse ecosystems. During the Late Jurassic, eastern Iberia lay along the margins of the expanding Atlantic, with shallow seas, coastal plains, and floodplains that periodically preserved the remains of the animals that roamed them. The addition of Diplodocus to this faunal list strengthens the resemblance between Iberian and North American Late Jurassic assemblages, supporting the idea of a broadly shared dinosaur fauna across the two regions rather than isolated provincial communities.

Diplodocus itself occupies a special place in the history of palaeontology and popular culture. First discovered in the United States in 1878, the genus is famous for its enormous length of up to 25 meters, its long whip-like tail, and its relatively small head perched at the end of a gracefully curved neck. Throughout the early twentieth century, casts of Diplodocus skeletons were displayed in leading natural history museums around the world, making the animal a symbol of global palaeontology and a beloved icon of prehistoric life. Its frequent appearances in exhibitions, books, and audiovisual productions about dinosaurs have made it one of the best-known of all the so-called terrible lizards among the general public, which is precisely why the confirmation of its presence in Europe carries such resonance both scientifically and culturally.

The fossils themselves are now on display for future research and public education in the dinosaur hall of the Museo Aragonés de Paleontología at Dinópolis in Teruel, a city in eastern Spain situated roughly between Madrid and Valencia. There, visitors can see the tangible evidence of an animal that lived 150 million years ago on a planet whose geography differed profoundly from today’s, when the Atlantic was still young and narrow and continents remained within reach of wandering giants. For palaeontologists, the specimen opens new questions about how many other supposedly North American dinosaur lineages may await discovery in European rocks, and about the frequency and duration of the dispersal events that connected the faunas of two continents. For the moment, the tail bones from La Tejería stand as the first physical proof that Diplodocus, the archetypal giant of the American Jurassic, also called Europe home.

Subject of Research: First discovery of the sauropod dinosaur genus Diplodocus outside North America, from Late Jurassic deposits in Teruel, Spain

Article Title: First ever find of a Diplodocus outside of North America

Article References: First ever find of a Diplodocus outside of North America. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Diplodocus, sauropod, Late Jurassic, Teruel, Spain, paleontology, Morrison Formation, faunal dispersal, proto-Atlantic, vertebrate paleontology, dinosaurs, Iberia

Personal ornamentation is far more than decoration. To archaeologists, beads and pendants are a vital proxy for symbolic behaviour and technological complexity, encapsulating everything from raw material collection and environmental knowledge to manufacturing skill and patterns of use and discard. As one of the hallmark expressions of Homo sapiens arriving in Europe, ornaments are especially crucial for investigating the technological knowledge and non-utilitarian practices of the first modern human groups on the Iberian Peninsula. Yet detailed functional analyses of such assemblages remain surprisingly scarce, which is what makes the Foradada study stand out.

The research team, led by Oriol Montero-Buch of the Universitat d’Alacant together with Ester Verdún-Castelló, Magdalena Gómez-Puche, Josep A. Casabó and Javier Fernández-López de Pablo, subdivided the cave’s ornament record into three distinct assemblages using stratigraphic and contextual criteria: an Early Upper Palaeolithic group, a mixed Upper Palaeolithic group and a Holocene group. This careful separation allowed the researchers to focus on the earliest phase, when modern humans were first establishing themselves in the region, while acknowledging the complexities introduced by later occupations of the cave.

The assemblage comprises thirty-five finished ornaments, alongside elements related to technical failures and accumulations of raw material. That combination is exceptionally informative, because it captures the entire life history of ornament production rather than just the end products. The range of materials selected is impressively broad, stretching from terrestrial mammal teeth to both marine and freshwater mollusc shells. This diversity suggests that the cave’s inhabitants possessed an intimate understanding of multiple ecological zones, from inland hunting territories to the nearby coastline, and deliberately targeted specific raw materials for ornamental purposes.

To unlock the secrets of these objects, the team employed a combined technological and traceological approach. Technological analysis examines the chaîne opératoire, the sequence of operations involved in producing each ornament, from raw material selection through perforation to final finishing. Traceology, or use-wear analysis, reads the microscopic marks left on the surfaces of the objects, revealing how they were suspended, how they moved against one another or against clothing, and how they ultimately came to be discarded. Together, these methods allowed the researchers to characterise the full biography of each bead and pendant, from manufacture through use to disposal.

Perhaps the most striking finding came from Raman spectroscopy, a non-destructive analytical technique that identifies mineral compounds by the way they scatter laser light. This analysis identified evidence of colour modification technology on the ornaments, meaning that some of the beads or shells had been deliberately treated to alter their colour, most likely with iron oxide pigments such as ochre. This represents one of the earliest documented uses of such colour modification on personal ornaments during the Early Upper Palaeolithic in the Iberian Peninsula, adding the region to the growing map of early pigment use across Eurasia and underscoring that these small objects carried aesthetic and symbolic significance that went beyond their natural appearance.

Comparative analysis with nearby regional ornamental assemblages revealed clear similarities between Foradada and other contemporary collections in the surrounding region. In the study of early modern human groups, ornament types can function rather like cultural fingerprints, and such shared patterns potentially point to common social networks and ethno-cultural identities linking communities across eastern Iberia. Recent large-scale European studies of Aurignacian and Gravettian ornaments have suggested that distinct ornamental traditions may correspond to distinct cultural groups, and the Foradada material now contributes an important data point from the Iberian Mediterranean margins to this emerging continental picture.

The researchers argue that the Foradada assemblage constitutes a significant collection of personal ornaments on the Iberian Peninsula during the Early Upper Palaeolithic, a period for which well-preserved and well-studied ornament assemblages remain comparatively rare in this part of Europe. The cave’s location, close to what would have been a dramatically different Late Pleistocene coastline, makes it a particularly valuable window onto how early coastal hunter-gatherer communities integrated marine resources, both dietary and symbolic, into their lives. Previous work at the site has already documented shellfish consumption during this period, and the ornament study now shows that shells also served as vehicles of identity and meaning.

Beyond its regional importance, the study makes a methodological case that is likely to resonate across Palaeolithic archaeology. The authors assess the potential value of integrating techno-functional analysis with spectroscopic methods as a way to add evidence on hunter-gatherer procurement strategies and their relationship with the environment. By combining microscopic reading of manufacturing and wear traces with mineralogical identification of pigment residues, archaeologists can extract far richer narratives from small ornamental objects than either technique alone could provide. Applied more widely, this integrated approach promises to illuminate not only how beads were made and used, but also where their raw materials came from, how far they may have travelled, and what that can reveal about the mobility and exchange networks of Europe’s earliest modern human societies.

For now, the ornaments of Cova Foradada stand as quiet testimony to a world nearly forty millennia past: a time when small groups of modern humans, perched between mountains and a cold sea on the edge of Europe, were already investing time, skill and meaning in the objects they wore against their skin. In their perforated teeth and pigmented shells, the first Iberian sapiens left behind a durable record of who they were, who they knew, and how they wished to be seen.

Subject of Research: Early Upper Palaeolithic personal ornaments and symbolic behaviour in eastern Iberia

Article Title: Early Upper Palaeolithic personal ornaments from Foradada cave (Xàbia, Alacant, Eastern Iberia)

Article References: Montero-Buch, O., Verdún-Castelló, E., Gómez-Puche, M., Casabó, J. A., & Fernández-López de Pablo, J. (2026). Early Upper Palaeolithic personal ornaments from Foradada cave (Xàbia, Alacant, Eastern Iberia). Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(10), Article 208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02555-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02555-w

Keywords: personal ornaments, Early Upper Palaeolithic, Foradada cave, Iberia, shell beads, perforated teeth, Raman spectroscopy, traceology, symbolic behaviour, hunter-gatherers, social networks, ochre