140 million years ago, the region which was going to become Charente was a swampy expanse lined with conifers, crossed by long neck giants whose imprints were lost in a petrified mud. It is in this old landscape, frozen by time and clay, that a giant dinosaur of Angeac has just resurfaced, revealing monumental vertebrae still articulated and an intact jaw.
This exceptional skeleton would have belonged to a still unknown species. One of the remarkable elements of this discovery lies in the state of conservation of the bones. These have been extracted with meticulousness since November 2024, in the laboratories of the Museum in Paris, where each vertebra, several tens of centimeters, is cleaned by brush, revealing the traces of a distant past. Le Figaro evokes a “probable new species” which could pay tribute to the Angeac site when it officially receives a name.
This excavation campaign, however barely started, is already historic. Jean-François Tournepiche, honorary curator of the Angoulême museum, speaks of a succession of extraordinary discoveries, evoking the discovery of several femurs even before the official start of excavations.
An environment radically different from the one we know
At the time when this giant dinosaur lived, the Charente was not a peaceful rural territory. 140 million years ago, the lower Cretaceous drew a world that is still largely unknown to scientists. Flower plants did not yet exist, giving way to vegetation dominated by conifers and ferns. The relatively homogeneous trees produced pine cones of great diversity, as Ronan Allain points out.
The current lands of Charente were then a little further south, in a Europe still fragmented into islands around large massifs. The Atlantic Ocean was just beginning to train, while Africa and South America still remained linked. This unstable geological context would have facilitated the fossilization of animals, quickly trapped under layers of protective clay after their death.
South West recalls that the Angeac site, nicknamed “Bonebed” by specialists, has already delivered nearly 100,000 fossil specimens since its fortuitous discovery in 2010. Each summer, for three weeks, around forty researchers continue the excavations. The 2025 campaign started under overwhelming heat, and yet the discoveries have continued to accumulate from the first trowel.
The scientific puzzle of an extraordinary specimen
What makes this giant Angeac dinosaur particularly fascinating is the scarcity of its state of conservation. Unlike the majority of fossils found in Europe, often fragmented, this specimen has several elements still anatomically connected. Such an articulation of the bones suggests an almost complete reconstruction of the skeleton, a extremely rare fact for such an old animal.
Researchers are still unaware of the precise causes of his death. Certain visible traces on the bones may indicate bites, but it is impossible to determine whether it is predation or charoging. The scene seems frozen in time. An animal that collapses, forming a slight depression, and no other fossil discovered around, as if this space had been reserved for it.
Charente Libre reports that other bones, including a femur of more than one meter sixty, appeared almost accidentally during the installation of excavation equipment. Members of the scientific team have described the scene as worthy of a film, where each shovel seems to reveal a new piece of the puzzle. There is even talk of a second sauropod found just below the first, a unique configuration according to the experts.
The continuation of excavations this summer could therefore confirm a daring hypothesis. That of two giants who died on each other, preserved by the whims of time and geology. One month of work remains to researchers to validate this intuition and, perhaps, reveal one of the specimens of the most complete Sauropods ever discovered in Europe.
