Dinosaurs fled Europe over 100 million years ago: Study

London, April 25

Dinosaurs migrated out of Europe between 125 and 100 million years ago after the original super continent broke up, according to a new study that used 'network theory' for the first time to visually depict the movement of dinosaurs around the world.

The research also reaffirms previous studies that have found that dinosaurs continued to migrate to all parts of the world after the 'super-continent' Pangaea split into landmasses that are separated by oceans.

"We presume that temporary land bridges formed due to changes in sea levels, temporarily reconnecting the continents," said Alex Dunhill, from the University of Leeds in the UK, who led the study.

"Such massive structures — spanning, for example, from Indo-Madagascar to Australia — may be hard to imagine," Dunhill said.

"But over the timescales that we are talking about, which is in the order of tens of millions of years, it is perfectly feasible that plate tectonic activity gave rise to the right conditions for such land bridges to form," he said.

The researchers used the Paleobiology Database that contains every documented and accessible dinosaur fossil from around the world.

Fossil records for the same dinosaur families from different continents were then cross-mapped for different periods of time, showing connections that show how they have migrated.

Some regions of the world, such as Europe, have extensive fossil records from a long history of palaeontology digs, while other parts of the world have been largely unexplored.

To help account for this disparity in fossil records, which could otherwise skew the findings, the researchers applied a filter to the database records to only count the first time that a dinosaur family connection occurred between two continents.

The findings support the idea that, although continental splitting undoubtedly reduced intercontinental migration of dinosaurs, it did not completely inhibit it.

The research also showed that all connections between Europe and other continents during the Early Cretaceous period (125-100 million years ago) were out-going.

While dinosaur families were leaving Europe, no new families were migrating into Europe, researchers said.

While network theory is commonly used in computer science for quantifying internet data, such as friend connections on Facebook, it has only recently been applied to biology research and this is the first study to use it to on dinosaur research.

The study was published in the Journal of Biogeography. — PTI