[This essay was originally posted on April 30th, 2012]

Dinosaurs are always going to be more popular than rays. There’s just no contest. I’m not saying this to be cruel to the chondrichthyans. I quite like the squishy, bat-winged fish. Nevertheless, it seems that the public would much rather imagine dinosaurs wading through the Cretaceous shallows than the grubbing of hungry rays. And I’m not going on an abstract tear here. I know that rays can’t beat dinosaurs because of an unpopular interpretation of a fossil tourist attraction in Spain.

Around 66 million years ago, the area around Isona, Spain was on a Cretaceous coastline. And, at one famous locality, it would appear as if