The first ever “local” dinosaur species has been found in Greenland.

European paleontologists have discovered a new species of dinosaurs in Greenland that has never been found anywhere before. It was named “Issi saaneq”, which means “cold bone” in the language of the Greenlandic Innuites. These are very ancient remains, their age is at least 214 million years – a time when most of the known species of dinosaurs did not exist yet. The remains were found back in 1994, but they were mistakenly attributed to the bones of a well-studied plateosaurus.

Today, scientists have at their disposal technologies such as microcomputer tomography, which allows you to see the smallest features of bones inside fossils. Repeated analysis of the findings showed that they have a lot of differences from plateosaurus – this is really a previously unknown species. Issi saaneq was classified as a sauropodomorph, which means that he was the ancestor of the largest creatures on Earth – sauropod dinosaurs. But he probably had a modest size, from 3 to 10 m, ate plant food and migrated following the movement of parts of the supercontinent. Around that time, Pangaea began to divide, the Atlantic Ocean appeared, so Issi saaneq ended up in modern Greenland – no wonder it had never been found before.