Meet Oceanotitan, a new Portuguese macronarian

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A new genus of titanosauriform macronarian sauropod has been described from Late Jurassic remains found in the Praia da Amoreira-Porto Novo Formation of Portugal. This new genus has been given the name Oceanotitan dantasi ("Dantas' ocean titan"), with the genus name referring to the fossils' discovery in situ at the base of a costal cliff in an area overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and the species name referring to Pedro Dantas, a Portuguese paleontologist who has devoted his career to Portuguese vertebrate paleontology. The new paper classifies Oceanotitan as potentially the oldest known somphospondylan and believes that its presence in Portugal, along with a large variety of other sauropod genera of Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous age in the Iberian Peninsula, suggests that the country may have played an important role in the Late Jurassic in the dispersal and diversification of several sauropod groups between North America, Africa, and Europe, especially in regard to macronarians. Here is a reconstruction of the new genus by DeviantArt user cisiopurple and an image of some of the fossils used to describe it, along with a link to the paper describing it.




Paper (abstract only): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2019.1578782