Europasaurus is a basal macronarian sauropod, a form of quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaur. It lived during the Late Jurassic (middle Kimmeridgian, about 154 million years ago) of northern Germany, and has been identified as an example of insular dwarfism resulting from the isolation of a sauropod population on an island within the Lower Saxony basin. Discovery and naming In 1998, a single sauropod tooth was discovered by private fossil collector Holger Lüdtke in an active quarry at Langenberg Mountain, between the communities of Oker, Harlingerode and Göttingerode in Germany. The Langenberg chalk quarry had been active for more than a century; rocks are quarried using blasting and are mostly processed into fertilisers. The quarry exposes a nearly continuous, 203 m (666 ft) thick succession of carbonate rocks belonging to the Süntel Formation, that ranges in age from the early Oxfordian to late Kimmeridgian stages and have been deposited in a shallow sea with a water depth of less than 30 m (98 ft). The layers exposed in the quarry are oriented nearly vertically and slightly overturned...