The skull was unearthed in the 1990s, during one of the excavation campaigns at Els Casots, the fossil site in the municipality of Subirats (Alt Penedès) which over time has become one of the benchmark Miocene localities in Europe.
At the time, researchers assumed it belonged to a specimen already known from the genus Paludocyon, of which fragmentary remains had been found in the area and in other countries. With nothing new to study, the piece was put into storage.
It was not until 2014, while a doctoral thesis was being prepared, that someone took another look at that skull and realised something did not quite add up. The species it had been compared with was far more robust, roughly the size of a lion or tiger and with a weight close to 200 kilos.
What they had in front of them seemed smaller and probably less muscular. The team at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont spent the last two years confirming their suspicion: it was not a known Paludocyon, but a species that no one had described before.
The new species has been named Paludocyon moyasolai, in honour of palaeontologist Salvador Moyà-Solà, and makes Els Casots the world reference site for this animal.
