Europe's most modern dinosaur site found in Catalan Pyrenees

Paleontologists have found the most modern site containing dinosaur remains ever discovered in Europe near the small town of Sant Romà d'Abella in the Catalan Pyrenees.

The Molí del Baró site in Pallars Jussà county had many dinosaur remains, especially of hadrosaurs, or duck-billed dinosaurs, teeth from carnivorous dinosaurs, and titanosaur egg fragments.

The site also contains crocodile bones and snail shells, as well as abundant vegetal remains, especially leaves from palm trees, but also fragments of tree trunks and seeds.

Studying the plant remains will allow researchers to paint a picture of the landscape in the area 66 million years, says Àngel Galobart, from the Catalan Institute of Paleontology.

Extracting the remains from the site, which was formed by clay deposits from a nearby river, has taken place over a period of years, beginning in 2002.

Galobart says dinosaurs lived for 150 million years, and so there are many sites from different periods, but this is the only one in Europe from the final period before the creatures died out.

Studying the remains will, therefore, allow researchers to reconstruct what the final landscapes were like in which the last dinosaurs lived before their extinction.