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Around 225 million years ago, ancestors of the long-necked dinosaurs or sauropods we all know from Jurassic Park already lived in the territory of present-day Switzerland. An international team of palaeontologists from Munich, Utrecht and Zürich was able to identify a new ancestor of the long-necked dinosaurs from rocks near Schaffhausen and gave it the name Schleitheimia schutzi. The discovery places the possible origin of true sauropods much earlier than the previously thought 190 million years ago.

When examining some incomplete remains from the Canton of Schaffhausen in the collection of the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Zurich, which had originally been identified as Plateosaurus – the first true sauropod genus – Munich palaeontologist Oliver Rauhut experienced a surprise. These remains did not originate from Plateosaurus, but represent a previously unknown species of sauropodomorphs, which is evolutionarily already very close to the sauropods.

Excavation on your doorstep

Rauhut, working at the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology and the Ludwig-Maximilians-ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ, and his colleagues Femke Holwerda from Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (Canada), and Heinz Furrer from the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Zürich described the species under the name Schleitheimia schutzi. The name is derived from the small village of Schleitheim, where the dinosaur’s remains were found in 1954, and the name of the finder Emil Schutz. The analysis of the relationship of the new genus carried out by the researchers shows that Schleitheimia is apparently the closest known relative of the true sauropods, which indicates that this group must also have had its origin in the Upper Triassic (between 237 and 201,3 million years ago).

Although Schleitheimia probably still looked quite similar to the well-known Plateosaurus, this animal is already considerably larger than the latter, with an estimated 9-10 m body length, even though it did by far not yet reach the dimensions of its later relatives, the truly gigantic sauropods. Furthermore, the new species was very robustly built and, like its gigantic descendants, probably moved on all fours, while Plateosaurus mostly walked on its hind legs.

"As you can see, you don't always have to travel to exotic foreign countries to discover new dinosaurs and gain new insights into their evolution - sometimes a visit to the neighbouring museum or an excavation on your doorstep is enough," Rauhut says.

Further finds

A new excavation in the immediate vicinity of the original site, which took place in 2016 under the direction of Furrer, brought to light further remains of sauropodomorphs, which, among other things, showed that Plateosaurus also occurred here. In addition, further old finds by Emil Schutz from a neighbouring site also indicate the presence of a third, as yet undetermined species of early sauropodomorphs.

Based on the fossil bones, the relationships of the new species and the fossil record of the sauropodomorphs known so far, Rauhut and his colleagues concluded that the early sauropods apparently lived next to their more primitive relatives for more than 20 million years. Only after the extinction of the latter towards the end of the Lower Jurassic did the sauropod success story begin, which was to make them the largest and, in many ecosystems, most important herbivores of the Mesozoic.

Article

The research on Schleitheimia schutzi is described in Oliver W. M. Rauhut, Femke M. Holwerda and Heinz Furrer, ‘A derived sauropodiform dinosaur and other sauropodomorph material from the Late Triassic of Canton Schaffhausen, Switzerland’, Swiss Journal of Geosciences volume 113, Article number: 8 (2020),