Off the coast of Istria, Croatia, a team of paleontologists is excavating dinosaur bones in a place most digs never go: underwater. The Datule-Barbariga site, submerged beneath one to six meters of Adriatic Sea water, has produced fossils since 1993, when someone gathering shellfish stumbled on a bone. This month, the team says it may have found something new.
According to an EFE wire report carried by Crónica on Oct. 14, citing Croatian broadcaster HRT and the Hina news agency, the international team has so far recovered neck vertebrae, lower-back bones and ribs from a large, long-necked, four-legged herbivore — a sauropod comparable in build to Brachiosaurus. American paleontologist Matthew Lamanna, of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Croatian team member Fran Vidaković are both quoted via HRT describing the animal as a likely new species, possibly related to Histriasaurus boscarollii, a sauropod first identified from Istrian remains in 1998.
That "new species" label is, for now, a field assessment relayed through broadcast and wire reports rather than a formal, peer-reviewed description — the kind of claim paleontologists often revise once bones are cleaned, compared and published. Croatian geologist and paleontologist Aleksandar Mezga, also cited by Hina, called the find the first known case of dinosaur remains located beneath the sea, a framing that could stand even if the species identification later shifts.
A long-running dig, newly revived
Lamanna's connection to the site predates this week's headlines. The Carnegie Museum has documented his work at the same roughly 130-million-year-old Early Cretaceous site going back to a 2018 multinational survey, which it billed as one of the world's first underwater explorations for dinosaur fossils. The Datule-Barbariga reserve, protected since 1994, is described by Istria's tourism authority as the only known underwater dinosaur site in the Mediterranean.
Recovery work continues at shallow depth, aided by divers rather than quarry crews, and researchers say more skeletal material is expected to surface before the season's excavation window closes. A formal species description, if one follows, would take considerably longer than the dig itself.