If you go on a fine day in suburban ravine, armed with a shovel, a bucket and a sieve will find the outputs of the Cretaceous Sands and have a good rummage in them, you have the chance to become the author of a scientific discovery. At worst you’ll just get the tooth of an ancient shark or a plesiosaur: it will be possible to show the children and explain what unusual creatures have lived before in these parts. In 1997 the student of geological faculty of Moscow state University Alexander Vydrik found in the deposits of quarry Sand, in the Kolomna district, and two vertebrae. Decided that it was the remains of an ancient marine reptile, the pliosaur — and handed them over to the Museum of the Moscow city station of young naturalists. There in the window they were lying the whole time.In 2017 these fossils was even put into a summary of the fossil reptiles of Moscow and Moscow region. But then the scientists decided to look at them carefully. The vertebrae are cleaned from adhering earth, spent 3D modeling, determined the terrain and found out that this is not a pliosaur, and the most that neither is a terrestrial dinosaur! Herbivorous lizard from the group of sauropods. And if you absolutely scientific, the representative of the superfamily Diplodocoidea, which includes, for example, Diplodocus of the late epoch of the Jurassic period, found in America. They were made famous by the film Director Steven Spielberg, making some of the most famous dinosaur in the world along with the tyrannosaurs. However, the sauropod from under Kolomna on the structure of the vertebrae closer to the other family of lizards: dicraeosaurids.”For the whole of the European part of Russia is the first Jurassic dinosaur-sauropods, — says Nikolay Zverkov, Junior researcher, Paleontological Institute RAS, where the study was conducted. None of sauropod in the Jurassic sediments here had not found”.This discovery, according to scientists, sheds light on the evolution of sauropods. It confirms the hypothesis that dicraeosaurids appeared in Asia in the middle Jurassic period and penetrated into Europe before these parts of the world were separated by the sea. And then the most advanced lizards moved to Africa and America.Thus, the dinosaur 165 million years ago trampled the ground near the modern Moscow, appeared to be ancient of their American relatives. Not only sauropods, but also other dinosaurs in the European part of Russia find extremely rare. The fact that in the days of their domination in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, this vast territory was covered with water. On land, where now are Moscow and the Moscow region, in the splashing of the Central Russian sea.”And the dinosaurs in the scientific sense — it is the lizards that walked on land and swam”, — says senior researcher of the Paleontological Institute of RAS Vladimir Alifanov. According to him, the region hour��about find bones of ancient rhinos, horses, mammoths — those who have lived here much later, a few hundred thousand years ago. There is no shortage of sharks and aquatic reptiles (plesiosaurs and the ichthyosaurs), and smaller sea creatures: the Ammonites and the belemnites, whose shell find in large quantities.In the middle of the Jurassic period the sea began to shrink and retreat. The current territory of Moscow and Moscow region aligns with the South land one of the microcontinents that time Fennoscandia. The area then was largely similar to modern Crimea mountains, karst voids, caves, limestone coast, a warm and mild climate.That visited the dinosaurs, paleontologists only learned in the 1990-ies. In the Kolomna district, near Sands station, in the local quarry have unearthed the tooth, which, as it turned out, belonged to a theropod predator of the Jurassic period. Then began a pilgrimage of paleontologists near Kolomna.”In later fees found another half-dozen kostevych teeth and phalanges, — says Vladimir Alifanov. The teeth were small, not more than 1 cm Analysis showed that they belonged to several types of so-called coelurosaurs. Traditionally they belong to the extensive branches of a small, light and mobile predators”. These few teeth and phalanges were the only evidence of the fact that in the European part of Russia was inhabited by dinosaurs of the Jurassic period, until the paleontologists decided to examine more carefully two petrified vertebrae from Museum of the Moscow city station of young naturalists.But in the suburban quarry sand where they were discovered 23 years ago, there is much more. For example, there was found a nearly entire skeleton of a turtle. And it turned out that this species was not previously known to science. It is not excluded that somewhere in the strata of rock waiting to be discovered and the skeleton of a dinosaur.
