Europasaurus

Europasaurus (meaning 'Europe lizard') is a basal macronarian sauropod, a form of quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaur. It lived during the Late Jurassic (middle Kimmeridgian, from about 154 to 151 million years ago) of northern Germany, and has been identified as an example of insular dwarfism resulting from the isolation of a sauropod population on an island within the Lower Saxony basin.

==Discovery and naming== thumb|left|Preparation of the fossil bones In 1998, a single sauropod tooth was discovered by private fossil collector Holger Lüdtke in an active quarry at Langenberg Mountain, between the communities of Oker, Harlingerode and Göttingerode in Germany. The Langenberg chalk quarry had been active for more than a century; rocks are quarried using blasting and are mostly processed into fertilisers. The quarry exposes a nearly continuous, thick succession of carbonate rocks belonging to the Süntel Formation, that ranges in age from the early Oxfordian to late Kimmeridgian stages and have been deposited in a shallow sea with a water depth of less than . The layers exposed in the quarry are oriented nearly vertically and slightly overturned, which is a result of the ascent of the adjacent Harz mountains during the Lower Cretaceous. Widely known as a classical exposure among geologists, the quarry had been extensively studied, and visited by students of geology for decades. Although rich in fossils of marine invertebrates, fossils of land-living animals had been rare. The sauropod tooth was the first specimen of a sauropod dinosaur from the Jurassic of northern Germany.