Long-Necked Dinosaur Fossils Found Where They Shouldn't Exist

Long-necked dinosaurs lived long after scientists thought they went extinct, making their way down into South America, according to new findings.

Argentine paleontologists have discovered fossils of diplodocid sauropods in Patagonia that contradict earlier conclusions that the long-necked creatures perished in the Jurassic era, The Associated Press reported.

"It was a surprise," said Pablo Gallina, a researcher at Buenos Aires' Maimonides University, as quoted by the AP, "because the first remains we found were very deteriorated and we didn't think much of them, but later through careful laboratory work, cleaning rock from the bones, we could see that they were from a diplodocid, something unthinkable for South America."

Excavated in Argentina's "Bajada Colorada," a formation dated to the Cretaceous era, the new find is the subject of a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

"Diplodocids were never certainly recognized from the Cretaceous or in any other southern land mass besides Africa," the authors wrote. "The new discovery represents the first record of a diplodocid for South America and the stratigraphically youngest record of this clade anywhere."

The fossils provide evidence that the whip-tailed sauropods inhabited South America long after they were supposed to be extinct. The eight vertebrae discovered have been placed in a new species called Leinkupal laticauda, a name that combines native Mapuche words for "vanishing" and "family" with the Latin words for "wide" and "tail," according to the AP.

The suprising find could be key to seeing how the population moved through different areas over time.

"A discovery like this is more than just another data point. It's a chance to re-evaluate our understanding of how the group spread across the globe through time," paleontologist John Whitlock of Mount Aloysius College in Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study, told the AP.

"We can use that information to do things like examine how dinosaurs might have chased their preferred environment around the globe as the climate changed, and that's the sort of research with direct implications for those of us around today."