These vertebrae were originally part of a series of four vertebrae collected in the 1909 expedition led by Werner Janensch; unfortunately, like some other fossils collected by German expeditions to Africa, the other bones were destroyed in World War II.
In 1868 Seeley had obtained a vertebra and a jaw, from a quarry near Langton Matravers; in 1869 he had named these Pterodactylus macrurus.
The fossil was in May 1978 found in a quarry operated by the Sanshilipu-commune, when an explosion exposed a vertebra.
Lurdusaurus was contemporaneous with the bizarre large theropod Suchomimus, which some believe to be synonymous with the slightly earlier Baryonyx from England, and with the sympatric Ouranosaurus, notable for its tall-spined vertebrae.
On 21 August 2007, Quinn was hospitalized in Toulouse, France for an operation to repair two broken vertebrae and a smashed Calcaneus, sustained after falling out of a first floor window of a rented villa he was staying in with his family.
While it is known as the home of the four men's hockey NCAA championships, one of its most famous (and tragic) events was in October 1995, when Travis Roy, a 20-year old freshman hockey player, lost his balance attempting to make a check eleven seconds into his first collegiate hockey shift versus North Dakota, breaking his neck at the fourth vertebra and paralyzing him from the neck down.