First Paleontological Findings in the La Serranía Region

Could giants have existed in La Serranía before the appearance of man? Today, the answer seems obvious, provided we clarify what the term "giants" might refer to. Searching through old books dealing with the Los Serranos region, we find what could be considered the first reference, albeit indirect, to dinosaur remains in our country: Don Vicente Mares, who was rector of the Parish Church of Chelva, a town located in the La Serranía region, cites in his 1681 work ‘La Fénix Troyana’: “(…) in la Yesa, two leagues from Chelva, a sepulcher was found which, by arranging the bones, each in its place, was 20 spans long. And twelve years ago in Chelva, in the area of la Torrecilla, another much larger in stature was found, of the most gigantic man of our times, and in the Villa de Alpuente around the year 1671 they found another of the same form” (Gasulla et al. 2009). Later, Segura-Barreda in 1868 refers to “some misshapen bones (…) in a state of fossilization” found in the vicinity of Morella, which, without specifying that they were from dinosaurs, concludes that “they cannot belong to any species known in our times.” But it was Vilanova y Piera (1872) who finally attributed these findings to Cretaceous reptiles, which is why the latter is considered the first direct citation of the discovery of dinosaur fossils.

However, the first explicit references to dinosaur fossils in the Los Serranos region would not be found until the beginning of the 20th century. In 1915, Ramón Trullenque (a pharmacist from the town of Carlet) informed the Royal Spanish Society of Natural History, of which he was a member, of the discovery of some bones in Benagéber that he attributed to Jurassic reptiles. This citation would be followed years later by those of Beltrán (1920) and those of Royo y Gómez (1925 and 1926a and b, among others), Rothé (1959), and Lapparent (1963), already in the second half of the century.

Nevertheless, it was not until the 1980s that the first systematic excavations in this region and the detailed study of the recovered fossils were carried out by Drs. J.V. Santafe and L. Casanovas, researchers from the Institut de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont in Sabadell. The material recovered during those field works allowed for the definition of a new species of sauropod from a site near the village of Losilla de Aras (within the municipality of Aras de los Olmos); which was given the name Losillasaurus giganteus Casanovas-Cladellas, Santafé and Sanz 2001, currently on display at the Museum of Natural Sciences of Valencia. In Alpuente, the relevant findings have been bones of stegosaurian dinosaurs assigned to the species Dacentrurus armatus– (CasanovasCladellas et al., 1999), the first found in Spain; and several isolated teeth belonging to theropod dinosaurs and a sauropod.

Extracted from the article “Los yacimientos con restos de dinosaurios del Jurásico Superior y Cretácico Inferior en la comarca de los Serranos (Valencia): Un patrimonio paleontológico con proyección en el desarrollo local” published in the Revista ISURUS No. 7 ISSN 1888-9441. Author: Maite Suñer (Director of the Paleontological Museum of Alpuente)