Los primeros descubrimientos de dinosaurios en España

The fi rst dinosaur discovery in Spain is a presumed theropod tooth from the Upper Jurassic of Asturias. It was described in 1858 as a shark tooth by the German mining engineer Guillermo Schulz and referred to the dinosaur Megalosaurus by the Navarrese geologist Justo Egozcue in 1873. However, the whereabouts of this fossil is currently unknown. In 1872 and 1873, the Valencian naturalist Juan Vilanova was the fi rst to specifi cally mention the discovery of dinosaur fossil remains from Spain. He described Iguanodon bones from the Lower Cretaceous of Utrillas (Teruel) and Morella (Castellon). The Vilanova collection, currently kept in the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales of Madrid, consists of fi ve fragmentary remains from Morella and, tentatively, one from Utrillas, but none is referable to Iguanodon. One of the Morella fossils is interpreted as a theropod vertebral centrum, a second one could represent the distal end of the neural spine of a diplodocoid sauropod, the other three remains are indeterminate bone fragments. The two “long bones” from Utrillas mentioned by Vilanova correspond to fragments of a theropod tibia, now lost, but recognizable from a drawing made around the 1920ʼs by the Castellonese palaeontologist José Royo Gómez. The study of dinosaurs in Spain was not highlighted during the 1800ʼs and the fi rst signifi cant discoveries were not made until the late 1910ʼs.