|
Welcome Aart's Walen Creatures & Features |
Aart Walen searching at the Portugese Torvosaurus site
Dutch Aart Walen is one of the few but also the leading European dinosaur modeller. His studio is located beside a dyke of the river Rijn near the village Doornenburg south of Arnhem. In the draughty shed casts of vertebra’s of the newly discovered dinosaur Europasaurus are being made, the first thing you see behind the door is a cast of the skull of Carnotaurus its almost looks like its smiling. The shed is full of tools, and a large workbench is filling most of the space. Storage racks covering the walls are filled with casts, replica’s and fossils trough witch a visitor could browse for weeks, Aart however knows to find every object unerringly. A stuffed cat is guarding the “office” were dinosaur eggs are laying beside cookies and coffee. |
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Schoolboy discovers the largest meat-eating dinosaur of Europe. |
|
On a warm summer day in 2003 father and son Walen from Doornenburg the Netherlands are walking along the coast of Praia Vermelha in Portugal. Suddenly the son Jacob notice a black shiny object in a rock. After taking a second look father Aart recognize the black part as being a dinosaur fossil. Aart than took the rock to there home in Doornenburg and removes the fossil from the rock. 
After months of preparation and many chisels further it appears to be a 63 cm long part of a jaw with 20 cm large teeth in it. Portuguese palaeontologist Octavio Matheus studied the object and concluded that the fossil belongs to the now largest known meat-eating dinosaur of Europe, Torvosaurus. The skull is equal in length of that of T.rex but twice as old. After reconstruction the skull appeared to be more then 135 cm in length. Later a part of a tibia was found in the same area, and as a result the European Torvosaurus can be given an estimated length of 11 meter and a weight of 2000 kg. It’s the first Torvosaur ever found outside North America (Colorado, Utah and Wyoming) and the largest known. These and other discoveries proves that Iberia and North America were connected to a land bridge in the Late Jurassic some 155 million years ago. |
|
|
