Plateosaur - Discovery and History

Discovery and History

In 1834, physician Johann Friedrich Engelhardt discovered some vertebrae and leg bones at Heroldsberg near Nuremberg, Germany. Three years later German palaeontologist Hermann von Meyer designated them as the type specimen of a new genus, Plateosaurus. Since then, remains of well over 100 individuals of Plateosaurus have been discovered at various locations throughout Europe.

Material assigned to Plateosaurus has been found at over 50 localities in Germany (mainly along the Neckar and Pegnitz river valleys), Switzerland (Frick) and France. Three localities are of special importance, because they yielded specimens in large numbers and of unusually good quality: near Halberstadt in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany; Trossingen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany; and Frick. Between the 1910s and 1930s, excavations in a clay pit in Saxony-Anhalt revealed between 39 and 50 skeletons that belonged to Plateosaurus, along with teeth and a small number of bones of the theropod Liliensternus, and two skeletons and some fragments of the turtle Proganochelys. Some of the plateosaur material was assigned to P. longiceps, a species described by palaeontologist Otto Jaekel in 1914 but now considered a junior synonym of P. engelhardti. Most of the material found its way to the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, where much of it was destroyed during World War II. The Halberstadt quarry today is covered by a housing development.

The second major German locality with P. engelhardti finds, a quarry in Trossingen in the Black Forest, was worked repeatedly in the 20th century. Between 1911 and 1932, excavations during six field seasons led by German palaeontologists Eberhard Fraas (1911–1912), Friedrich von Huene (1921–23), and finally Reinhold Seemann (1932) revealed a total of 35 complete or partially complete skeletons of Plateosaurus, as well as fragmentary remains of approximately 70 more individuals. The large number of specimens from Swabia had already caused German palaeontologist Friedrich August von Quenstedt to nickname the animal Schwäbischer Lindwurm (Swabian lindworm or Swabian dragon). Much of the Trossingen material was destroyed in 1944, when the Naturaliensammlung in Stuttgart (predecessor to the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart (SMNS)) burnt to the ground after an Allied bombing raid. Luckily, however, a 2011 study by SMNS curator Rainer Schoch found that, at least from the finds of Seemann's 1932 excavation, "the scientifically most valuable material is still available".

The Plateosaurus skeletons in a clay pit of the Tonwerke Keller AG in Frick, Switzerland, were first noticed in 1976. While the bones are often significantly deformed by taphonomic processes, Frick yields skeletons of P. engelhardti comparable in completeness and position to those of Trossingen and Halberstadt.

In 1997, workers of an oil platform of the Snorre oil field, located at the northern end of the North Sea, were drilling through sandstone for oil exploration when they stumbled on a fossil they believed to be plant material. The drill core containing the fossil was extracted from 2,256 metres (7,402 ft) below the seafloor. Martin Sander and Nicole Klein, palaeontologists of the University of Bonn, analysed the bone microstructure and concluded that the rock preserved fibrous bone tissue from a fragment of a limb bone belonging to Plateosaurus, making it the first dinosaur found in Norway. Plateosaurus material has also been found in the Fleming Fjord Formation of East Greenland.

Plateosaurus gracilis, the older species, is found in the Löwenstein Formation (Lower Norian). P. engelhardti stems from the upper Löwenstein Formation (Upper Norian), the Trossingen Formation (Upper Norian), and equivalently aged rock units. Plateosaurus thus lived probably from approximately 214 to 204 million years ago.