For the first time, confirmed dinosaur fossils have been found in Saudi Arabia — who knew they were so hard to find there?
A plant-eating titanosaur and a sharp-toothed theropod are the first confirmed dinosaur fossils ever found in Saudi Arabia, scientists reported Dec. 26 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Dinosaur fossils are rare in the Arabian Peninsula; previous finds mainly include teeth and bone fragments of similar species from Jordan, Oman and Lebanon, the researchers report.
“This discovery is important not only because of where the remains were found, but also because of the fact that we can actually identify them,” Benjamin Kear, lead study author, said in a statement. “These are the first taxonomically recognizable dinosaurs reported from the Arabian Peninsula,” said Kear, a paleobiologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
