For the first time in history, confirmed dinosaur fossils have been found in Saudi Arabia. Rare in the Arabian Peninsula, the finding of the 72-million-year-old tail-bones of the plant-eating titanosaur and a fossilized teeth of a sharp-toothed theropod were discovered in the Adaffa formation, a pile of sandstone and conglomerates deposited during the Late Cretaceous Period (at a time when Saudi Arabia had not yet separated from Africa and parts of Arabia were underwater). The teeth were found about 7 miles northeast of Al Khuraybah along the coast of the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. Other rare finds, mainly teeth and bone fragments, of a similar species had been found previously in Jordan, Oman, and Lebanon.
Benjamin Kear, a paleobiologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, said:
“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. These are the first taxonomically recognizable dinosaurs reported from the Arabian Peninsula.”
The bones were identified as a string of vertebrae from the tail of a Brontosaurus-like sauropod and teeth from a carnivorous dinosaur, likely a theropod.