Europasaurus

Chapter • Meet the dinosaur

Overview

Europasaurus holgeri was a sauropod in miniature. It had all the hallmarks of a long-necked plant-eater — a barrel-shaped body, pillar-like legs, a long neck and a long tail carried horizontally clear of the ground — yet the whole animal measured only about six metres from snout to tail tip and weighed roughly 700–1,000 kilograms. The skull was fairly tall and blunt with large nasal openings, typical of macronarian sauropods, and the jaws carried spoon-shaped teeth suited to stripping foliage rather than chewing it. The skin was scaly; there is no evidence of feathers in sauropods. Its small size was not simply a matter of the fossils being juveniles. Thin sections through the bones reveal growth marks and, in the largest individuals, an outer layer of dense, slowly deposited bone — the signature of a skeleton that had stopped growing. Researchers interpret this as insular dwarfism: on an island with limited food, animals that can survive on less are favoured, and body size shrinks over generations. Europasaurus is one of the clearest dinosaurian examples of the phenomenon. The animal was strictly herbivorous. With its head held roughly two to three metres above the ground it could browse shrubs and the lower branches of conifers, as well as cycads and ferns. Teeth wore down quickly and were replaced continuously, and the plant matter was almost certainly not chewed but fermented slowly in a capacious gut. The first bones were found in 1998 by amateur collector Holger Lüdtke in the Langenberg limestone quarry at Oker, near Goslar in Lower Saxony, Germany. The species was described in 2006 by P. Martin Sander and colleagues, with the species name honouring its discoverer. The quarry has since yielded hundreds of bones from many individuals spanning hatchlings to adults, along with unusually complete skull material described in detail in 2015.

Chapter • Where it lived

Habitat

Europasaurus lived about 154–151 million years ago, during the Kimmeridgian stage of the Late Jurassic. At that time much of present-day Europe lay beneath a warm, shallow sea dotted with an archipelago of limestone islands. The dinosaur inhabited one of these islands in what is now Lower Saxony in northern Germany, a coastal landscape of conifers, cycads and ferns. All confirmed remains come from the Langenberg quarry at Oker near Goslar, where the bones were buried in marine limestones after carcasses were washed offshore.

Chapter • Wild behavior

Behavior & Ecology

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Chapter • Scientific place

Taxonomy