Dwarf German Dino had Island Life, Journal Says
June 7, 2006
The dwarf dinosaur is a tiny member of the sauropod family, a group of four-footed herbivorous dinosaurs that were the largest animals to ever tread the land.
University of Bonn paleontologist Martin Sander and colleagues studied 11 specimens preserved in marine carbonate rock at a quarry near Goslar, Lower Saxony. The layers are in so-called Kimmeridgian rock of the Late Jurassic period, which makes them between 150 and 155 million years old.
The creatures have body lengths ranging from 1.7 to 6.2 meters (10.5-20 feet), which seemed so preposterously small for sauropods that the team initially thought the specimens were juveniles.
"Holger's reptile from Europe"
But a closer look at the skulls and isolated bones showed that they were in fact dwarfed adults.
The species has been named Europasaurus holgeri, or "Holger's reptile from Europe," in honor of Holger Luedtke, a self-taught paleontologist who found the first bones in 1998.
If E. holgeri were alive today, it would stand shoulder-high to an adult human, and its young would be about the size of a German shepherd dog.
At the time when the little dinosaurs were alive, central Europe was submerged by sea. The theory is that they lived on one of the large islands around the Lower Saxony basin.
"Such islands would not have been able to support large-bodied sauropods," says the study, which appears in Nature, the weekly British science journal.
"The ancestor of the Europasaurus would have dwarfed rapidly on immigrating to the island, or as a response to shrinking land masses caused by rising sea levels," the journal said.