Yacimiento: Galve, Teruel, España

Brief introduction to the history of Galve and of José María Herrero Among professional and amateur palaeontologists alike, the small village of Galve in the Aragonese province of Teruel is well known on account of the discovery of vertebrate fossils from the Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous, including – most spectacularly – its dinosaur remains. The story began in the 1940s, when a 10-year-old boy by the name of José María Herrero from the local village started to take an interest in invertebrate fossils, motivated above all by what his school teacher had told him about the process of fossilization. Years later, while farming some of the family land, he came upon a fragment of fossilized trunk that made him think that this land was different from what was in the higher part of the valley of Galve (known in geological terms as the Galve syncline), where there was an abundance of marine shell fossils. He was acquainted with the shepherds’ tales that told of great petrified bones, and he set about searching for these fossils. Eventually, José María’s perseverance paid off when he found the first dinosaur remains on a site known in the palaeontological literature as La Maca. He was helped by his sister Teresa with the transport of these bones, using a mare and pannier to take advantage of the relatively few moments of rest he could take from his farm work. In the village there were those who gave him encouragement and others who made fun of him, but José María never lost heart. On the contrary, he set about an exhaustive search of the area that has continued for the 40 years of his life since, first on his own and subsequently accompanied by his children as they grew and learnt the “trade.” This singular team found more than 60 vertebrate sites, a number of which are of great scientific interest. One of the most interesting discoveries was the Las Zabacheras site. This site was found by José María on the bank of the 1930s-built road that enters the village. The road itself ran right through the site, and according to José María Herrero and others who saw it under construction, the workers used bone fragments to form the base of the road. Perhaps we shall never find out what lies buried beneath the road, but thanks to Herrero’s work it was possible to recover abundant material, most of which was bones belonging to a single species of dinosaur, used years afterwards to describe a new sauropod, Aragosaurus, to which we shall return later. At the end of the 1950s, one of José María’s cousins, Luis Español Marzo, wrote an article for the local newspaper Lucha (now the Diario Teruel) on the bones from Galve. This in turn aroused the interest of Fernández Galiano, a natural science teacher in Teruel. Work was started on excavations with the backing of the Provincial Museum of Teruel, and the then heritage specialist of the Museum of Teruel, Purificación Atrián, made her first visit to the village. The result of these first investigations and a preliminary donation by José María Herrero was the important material from Galve to be found in the Museum of Teruel. This is currently on display in a permanent exhibition with which many of our readers may already be familiar. Among many other items, it includes the pubis of Aragosaurus and various bones of Iguanodon, one of the best known herbivores from the Lower Cretaceous of Europe. Shortly afterwards, the French palaeontologist Lapparent concluded his first study of the Galve dinosaurs, basing his work on earlier quotations from Fernández Galiano. It was Lapparent who suggested that the bones from Las Zabacheras belonged to a new genus of camarasaurid sauropod, and this is how it was subsequently classified by the palaeontologist from the Autonomous University of Madrid, José Luis Sanz, and his colleagues when they gave the name to Aragosaurus. At around the same time, Lapparent also identified an ornithopod typical of the Lower Cretaceous, Iguanodon, in various of the sites that he was shown by Herrero. The wealth of fossils to be found in Galve and the work of Lapparent in turn attracted teams from the University of Berlin and the Palaeontology Museum of Sabadell, which were more interested in the mammals than the dinosaurs. Accordingly, it was not until the 1980s that further research was done into the dinosaurs of Galve. This was the time when José Luis Sanz and his colleagues from the Autonomous University of Madrid carried out a major review of all the Galve vertebrates, defined the new sauropod as Aragosaurus, and studied other species of dinosaurs, including the numerous remains of Iguanodon and the less abundant but quite spectacular remains of large theropods. In the early 1990s, it was our turn to take over the “dinosaurological” torch, and we began our work in Galve. In the first years we restored and studied the tracks of Los Corrales del Pelejón and Las Cerradicas, and 1994 we succeeded in placing all the vertebrate sites (of which there were some 60) in the stratigraphic column of Galve. If the sites or fossils are of “whereabouts unknown,” they are of no scientific value. This was something we told José María Herrero, who, to our great satisfaction, took us to all the places he had discovered and from which he had gathered surface fossils. These were marvellous, intense days, as José María embellished this guided tour with his impressive stock of recollections from the past, giving us vivid accounts of episodes experienced by the people of Galve during the war, his way of working in the early days, his gratitude to the German palaeontologists Kuhne and Krebs for recognizing the importance of the site so early on, and a whole host of anecdotes about himself and his singular team of co-workers during their explorations.