In Spanish they are called the three « h «. I write it in Catalan and you will translate it yourselves. Footprints, eggs and bones. They are the three elements of great value that have been found in the paleontological site of Fumanya, in Berguedà. It is an exceptional site. Now you will see it. "Here there were above all what we popularly call « long-necked dinosaurs «, that is, titanosaurs", explains Bernat Vila, geologist and paleontologist specialized in dinosaurs and macroevolution of the fossil record.Everything that has been found here has given us a lot of information about the sizes, how they walked, how they reproduced, how they grew, or where the dinosaurs grazed in this territory. They are the last dinosaurs that lived in Europe, disappeared due to the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. "The approximate length of their torso, that is, the distance between the hind and front legs, has been calculated at about three meters. And they were about 11 meters long," specifies Bernat. "Counting the neck and tail quite horizontally," I ask him. "Yes." "Its foot was about seventy centimeters long and the sole of the foot was padded to support the weight of the body," he specifies. "The skull was relatively small and pointed, and they had small, pencil-shaped teeth that they used to tear up vegetation. They had front legs shorter than the hind legs. They walked by moving both legs on one side at the same time and then those on the other," explains Bernat Vila, who dedicated a lot of hours to excavating and studying this site. Today we take a trip seventy million years back. This area was a muddy plain near the sea, which stretched for hundreds of kilometers to the west, and inland there were shallow lakes and riverbeds that often dried up. Over millions of years, that sea gradually retreated. Dinosaur footprints were imprinted in the mud and, once dried, a layer of materials was deposited until they were solidified into rock.We are at the permanent exhibition of the Dinosaures Fumanya Interpretation Centre. When the building didn't exist, eggs and bones ended up at the Catalan Institute of Paleontology, in Sabadell. The most logical thing was for them to return. And so it was. To achieve this, Alba Boixader, head of the Cercs Mines Museum, to which the Dinosaures de Fumanya Interpretation Centre depends, put pressure: "I would have chained myself to the bridge of the Baells reservoir if they hadn't returned them," she says as we admire a fossilized titanosaur skin.

One of the most iconic scenes in cinema from the signature of Steven Spielberg. In Jurassic Park (1993) paleobotanist Ellie Sattler –Laura Dern– and paleontologist Alan Grant –Sam Neill– observe, for the first time, a colossal living brachiosaurus. In the background, the music of John Williams. If we add to this the friendly face of Sir Richard Attenborough, and his "Welcome to Jurassic Park!", the epic of the moment is unparalleled. Rarely had the seventh art turned scientists into heroines and heroes – into cult characters.It is not surprising that on July 13th, sad news struck not only the film industry, but millions of people who love dinosaurs. We lost actor Sam Neill and, with him, our cinematic paleontologist. In the three films he appeared in – the "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World" sagas – we accompany him as he excavates with a brush and ground-penetrating radar, seeks funding for research in Montana, or speaks knowledgeably about his subject of study. Furthermore, he conveys passion. "He was always my favorite since I was a child," he confesses to Dr. Sattler when they care for a sick triceratops. Thanks to these characters, other children, and adults, joined the large legions of dinomania. Some even decided to dedicate themselves to paleontology as a profession. And, we insist, we owe a large part of the credit to the now mourned Sam Neill, who knew how to distance himself from the mere muscular adventurer to embody a hero capable of uniting science and humanity, Dr. Alan Grant.Other scientists in celluloid

Are there other celluloid paleontologists who have sparked scientific vocations? Besides Professor Challenger in The Lost World (Hoyt, 1925), it is obligatory to mention Kyohei Yamane in Godzilla (Honda, 1954). Far from wanting to exterminate Godzilla – a dinosaur mutated by nuclear radiation – he fights to protect him from human stupidity, the same stupidity that has created powerful self-destruction weapons. It was seeing this film, and Yamane's personality, that marked the career of José Luis Sanz, today professor emeritus at the Autonomous University of Madrid and one of the world's leading dinosaur experts. In a documentary premiered at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, The Valley of Concavenator (2022), Sanz acknowledges the strong link between cinema and the genesis of his career in the field of paleontology. For example, in 2010 he and his team published the discovery of a new dinosaur species: Concavenator corcovatus, the co-star creature of the documentary directed by Víctor Matellano; the other star is a reptile, also carnivorous and bipedal, but fictional: Gwangi.The Valley of Gwangi (O'Connelly, 1969) was filmed, for the most part, in Cuenca. And the Concavenator was excavated, precisely, at the Conca de Las Hoyas site, and is called the Cuenca hunter. Who would have told Ray Harryhausen, the master of special effects who brought Gwangi to life (a kind of hybrid between a tyrannosaur and an allosaur), that a similar predator existed in this very habitat: the Concavenator, which would end up landing in Hollywood at the hands of Barcelona director J.A. Bayona. It appears in a diorama in the Lockwood Museum in the footage of Jurassic World. Fallen Kingdom (2018).Harryhausen was also the author of the prehistoric creatures that parade through the film A million years ago (Chaffey, 1966). Raquel Welch's image, in her antediluvian bikini, next to John Richardson's loincloth, steals the spotlight from the dinosaurs, which serves to remind us that the association of humans and these fossil reptiles has never existed. Nor has there been the de-extinction that, with the help of genetic engineering, ventured the writer Michael Crichton in his novels. Dinosaurs – with the exception of birds – became extinct 66 million years ago, and the first hominins appeared in Africa between 7 and 6 million years ago (the Homo sapiens, only 350,000 years ago).

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Sotheby's, the world's largest and oldest auction house for art and luxury items, has sold the skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex for $50.1 million. The transaction took place this Tuesday after a bidding war between seven buyers that lasted nearly ten minutes, and the piece has become the most expensive fossil in history. Until now, the fossil that held this title was that of a stegosaurus, which was auctioned for $44.6 million two years ago.

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Coinciding with the summer, the latest film in the series initially based on the famous book has just been released in theaters. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. This science fiction adventure novel, published in the 1990s, posed the possibility of the de-extinction of the dinosaurs using DNA from these extinct animals extracted from the blood sucked by mosquitoes that had been trapped in the resin turned into amber. Crichton was inspired by the advances in genetic engineering in the 1980s and the potential applications of PCR (polymerase chain reaction, which allows any DNA fragment to be amplified and which we have heard so much about during Covid-19). Shortly after, Steven Spielberg, with his gift for directing films that tell stories that manage to capture everyone's imagination, made a highly successful film, with a recognizable and iconic logo.

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Very agile, but of medium size and with small horns that served to match or intimidate opponents. This was the Khankhuuluu –the prince of dragons, in Mongolian–, a new species of dinosaur considered the most recent ancestor of the giant tyrannosaurs and which paleontologists from the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary have just discovered. In a publication in the journal NatureResearchers have described how this lineage of predators evolved after the extinction of other large predatory dinosaurs around 85 million years ago, providing further insight into the evolution of tyrannosaurs.

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