Feast of pre-Jurassic fossils found in Alicante province

Researchers seek help to discover more about vital period in evolution of life on Earth

Scientists have discovered, in four parts of Alicante province, thousands of fossils from plants and vertebrates dating back over 220 million years to the Late Triassic period, predating all but the earliest dinosaurs.

The pieces, found in rocky areas of Vallongues in Elche, Tibi, Agos and Biar, include amber, tooth fragments, amphibian and archosauriform reptile scales, and partial skeletons of lungfishes, freshwater sharks, cynodonts (ancestors of mammals), as well as exceptionally well-preserved remnants of flora, such as various families of equisetidae (horsetails), ferns and gymnosperms.

Leading the study is David Vento, a biologist specialised in herpetofauna who actually works as a school inspector, alongside various researchers, including Francisco Javier Molina Hernández, a geoarchaeologist and specialist technician at Alicante University; and Daniel Belmonte Más, archaeologist and secondary school teacher.

They are collaborating with researchers from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and from Granada and Valencia universities, with the aim of attracting more specialists.

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In 2023 they studied various geological formations from the beginnings of the Mesozoic era, where in previous years they had found plant remains and some evidence of animals from that time. The geological strata surprised them, as they indicated that the vertebrates could have been the oldest in the province, which would make the area an international reference point for the variety of elements and how well-preserved they are.

This stage was vital in the evolution of reptiles and other groups, such as the first mammals, which expanded thanks to an ideal ecosystem in large alluvial plains with rivers and lakes near the coast, when the Iberian Peninsula was a subtropical region not far from the separation between the ancient continents of Laurasia (including Europe) and Gondwana (including Africa), at the far east of the Tethys Ocean (this part of which would become the Mediterranean).

Vento says this blooming could also have been helped by a period called the Carnian Pluvial Episode, when it rained very heavily and frequently for over a million years. This swept up vegetation and shaped the evolution and diversification of living beings, which had to adapt giving rise to lungfish and freshwater sharks, from which the remains of teeth just a few centimetres long have been found.

And while digging for microfauna, they have found fragments of tree trunks over a metre long, and a species of conifer buried with fossilised leaves on which marks left by mosquitoes can be seen.

Enrique Peñalver Mollá, a palaeontologist from the CSIC and renowned expert in insect fossils and therefore in amber, is collaborating and Vento claims they have found the oldest resin fossil in the world.

Having only recently received excavation permits from the regional government, they can now study the wealth of geological and palaeontological material in detail. They started by looking for microinvertebrates but the arrival of summer meant they could only manage two digs, in which they found the remains of large terrestrial animals which could have measured between three and five metres, and were probably ancestors of Tyrannosaurus Rex, as well as remains of ribs from armoured animals over a metre long, possible tortoise tracks and even large coprolites (fossilised faeces).

For now the researchers are funding all their own work, but they are seeking institutions like universities and museums to collaborate so that the pieces found can be preserved and exhibited in the future. They are also asking universities, such as the one of Alicante, to provide technical and human resources for digs, which could be educational for students.

The samples they have studied are being provisionally deposited at the Alcoy museum of palaeontology. 

“We are increasing knowledge about a period that is very complicated to study because it is very ancient and very changed, because the sea dried up,” said Vento, who remains enthusiastic about continuing his two decades of work and revealing these exciting discoveries.

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Images: David Vento/ResearchGate