In Depth
Fossils of Abditosaurus were originally discovered in 1954 and then described in 1956 as belonging to Hypselosaurus. Further study later in the twentieth century however began to see the Hypselosaurus genus as a dubious one, and many fossils that were assigned to new genera. A fresh expedition to the 1954 discovery site between 2012 and 2014 discovered additional fossil remains that were then described in 2017. In 2022 a new genus, Abditosaurus, was erected to include these fossils.
Abditosaurus is a genus of titanosaurian dinosaur that lived in Western Europe during the late Cretaceous. More specifically Abditosaurus is a saltasaurine titanosaur. One key discovery about Abditosaurus is that the neck and back vertebrae were found partially articulated, a rare discovery in sauropods/titanosaurs. The estimated size of the Abditosaurus holotype has revealed this dinosaur to have been quite large when compared to other European titanosaur genera (e.g. Magyarosaurus) living in the Late Cretaceous.
Further reading
- Pr�sence de Dinosauriens dans le Cr�tac� sup�rieur du bassin de Tremp (province de L�rida, Espagne). - Compte rendu sommaire des s�ances de la Soci�t� g�ologique de France. 14: 261–262 - A. F. de Lapparent & E. Aguirre - 1956.
- Systematic study of the historical material of Upper Cretaceous reptiles from the Tremp Basin (Catalonia, Spain) housed at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (Madrid). - Journal of Iberian Geology. 43 (2): 217–233 - M. Mart�n Jim�nez, B. S�nchez-Chill�n, Fernando Escaso, Pedro Mocho, Iv�n Narv�ez,Francisco Ortega & Ad�n P�rez-Garc�a - 2017.
- A titanosaurian sauropod with Gondwanan affinities in the latest Cretaceous of Europe. - Nature Ecology & Evolution. 6 (3): 288–296. - Bernat Vila, Albert Sell�s, Miguel Moreno-Azanza, Novella L. Razzolini, Alejandro Gil-Delgado, Jos� Ignacio Canudo & �ngel Galobart - 2022.
