The dark legend of Count Dracula, a sadistic historical figure known as Vlad the Impaler who inspired Bram Stoker to create the most famous vampire of all time, has evolved into a muscular rival for good looks. An international team of paleontologists has discovered a new species of dwarf dinosaur in the current area of the Țara Hațegului International Geopark (Hațeg Land) in the southwest of the Romanian region of Transylvania. Dubbed Transylvanosaurus platycephalus, meaning “flat-headed Transylvanian reptile,” this herbivorous dinosaur would have inhabited the Cretaceous period more than 70 million years ago, the University of Bucharest reported late last week. With this discovery, the Hațeg Basin has become an important epicenter of late Cretaceous vertebrate discovery in Europe in recent years, where up to ten dinosaur species have been identified.
The bones found, parts of the Transylvanosaurus skull, provide a new insight into the evolution of European fauna just before the dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago. This previously unknown species of dinosaur was about two meters long, walked on two legs and belonged to the Rhabdodontidae family. Its body was small, like other vertebrates discovered in the area, already known as “dwarf dinosaurs”. “The limited food resources that were then available in these parts of Europe led to a reduction in the body size of these animals,” explains Felix Augustin, a paleontologist at the German University of Tübingen, who is leading the research. The discovery was recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The bones of ‘Transylvanosaurus platycephalus’ found in Romania. Dylan Bastiaans – University of Zurich.
During most of the Cretaceous period, which stretched from 145 to 66 million years ago, Europe was a tropical archipelago. Transylvanosaurus lived alongside other miniature dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles and pterosaurs on one of the archipelago’s many islands – one of which was Hateg in the vanished Tethys Sea. “With each newly discovered species, we refute the widely held hypothesis that the fauna of the Late Cretaceous would have had low diversity on what is now European territory,” says Augustin. During the Late Cretaceous, Rhabdodontidae were among the best represented groups of small and medium-sized European herbivores. Related species found earlier in Hațeg, such as Zalmoxes, had much less flattened skulls than Transylvanosaurus.
The taxonomic identification was based on fossils that were no larger than 12 centimeters – the back of the skull with the foramen magnum and the two frontal bones. “In the frontal bone, we could even see the outlines of the Transylvanosaurus brain,” reveals paleontologist Dylan Bastiaans from the University of Zurich. Zoltán Csiki-Sava, professor at the Faculty of Geology at the University of Bucharest, and his team discovered the skull bones of Transylvanosaurusplatycephalus in the Țara Hațegului riverbed in 2007. “This diversity is somewhat unusual. In most cases, the finds in Hațeg consist of only a few bones, but even these can sometimes provide surprising information, as is now the case with Transylvanosaurus,” says Csiki-Sava.
Island dwarfism
This discovery surprised researchers, however, since the new dinosaur’s closest relatives lived in modern-day France, raising the question: how did Transylvanosaurus come to colonize the “island of the pygmy dinosaurs”? “, which at that time covered the territory of Transylvania ? As explained by its discoverers, there would be several possibilities.
The oldest fossils attributed to the Rhabdodontidae group come from Eastern Europe. From there, these animals could have spread west, and later certain species would have returned to what is now Țara Hațegului territory. Experts suspect that sea-level fluctuations and tectonic processes led to the creation of temporary land bridges between the different islands, allowing the dinosaurs to move and spread to other locations. It is even believed that almost all dinosaurs, including Transylvanosaurus, could swim to some extent. “They had strong legs and tails. Most species, especially reptiles, are born able to swim,” says Augustin. An alternative scenario assumes that certain groups of Rhabdodontidae evolved in parallel in eastern and western Europe. Instead, scientists still cannot determine exactly how this species got to Transylvania. “We currently have very little data to answer this question,” says Augustin.
The Transylvanosaurus fossils would have survived for tens of millions of years, protected by the sediments of an ancient riverbed, until the waters of another modern river carried them out again. “If the dinosaur skeleton had simply been exposed to the surface instead of being partially buried by river sediments, weather conditions and scavengers would have destroyed all of its remains at a rapid rate, and we would never have known of the dinosaur’s existence.” this kind,” says Agustín.
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