Dinosaurs fled from Europe for no apparent reason, researchers find

Researchers applied new techniques to the fossil record, allowing them to show the huge migration that dinosaurs engaged in, all across the world

Florasaurus, the giant diplodocus made of plants roams through Central London, as Flora launches a programme of activities to connect children and families with where their food comes from

Dinosaurs seem to have fled Europe for no apparent reason, according to a major new study.

The research shows the huge degree of migration that happened during the Mesozoic Era - including the unexplained move out of Europe.

The new study, which used network theory techniques that are usually associated with computer science, also shows the movement of the dinosaurs over huge land bridges that connected the world’s continents together after the supercontinent Pangaea split apart.

Such bridges would have allowed for huge migrations as dinosaurs moved between the modern continents. Changes in sea levels would temporarily reconnect the continents and see the dinosaurs move across the world – and, notably, out of Europe.

“We presume that temporary land bridges formed due to changes in sea levels, temporarily reconnecting the continents,” said Alex Dunhill, who led the study.

"Such massive structures – spanning, for example, from Indo-Madagascar to Australia – may be hard to imagine. But over the timescales that we are talking about, which is in the order of tens of millions of years, it is perfectly feasible that plate tectonic activity gave rise to the right conditions for such land bridges to form."

The findings show that the splitting of continents might have slowed migrations, dinosaurs continued to move between continents even after they moved apart.

The research was put together by using the Paleobiology Database, which includes every documented and accessible dinosaur fossil ever found. To produce the plot of how the dinosaurs moved, the researchers then cross-mapped for different periods of time, showing how the same families moved between different continents.

It found that much of that movement during the Early Cretaceous period, which was about 100 million years ago, moved out of Europe. Dinosaurs moved out of the continent - but others didn’t come back in.

"This is a curious result that has no concrete explanation,” said Alex Dunhill, who led the study. |It might be a real migratory pattern or it may be an artefact of the incomplete and sporadic nature of the dinosaur fossil record."

Network theory is a common way for computer scientists to map out connections between places or people online – allowing for the visualisation of friends on Facebook, for instance. But the new study is the first time that it has been used on dinosaur research, as a way of exploring the complex systems of movement that saw the animals move around the planet.