The biota of the Upper Cretaceous site of Lo Hueco (Cuenca, Spain)
- Ortega Coloma, Francisco Javier
- Bardet, Nathalie 1
- Barroso Barcenilla, Fernando 2
- Callapez, Pedro M. 3
- Cambra Moo, Óscar 4
- Daviero-Gómez, Véronique 5
- Díez Díaz, Verónica 6
- Domingo Martínez, Laura
- Elvira, Ángel 7
- Escaso Santos, Fernando 7
- García Oliva, Mauro 7
- Gómez, Bernard 5
- Houssaye, Alexandra 8
- Knoll, Fabien 9
- Marcos Fernández, Fátima 7
- Martín Jiménez, Marcos 7
- Mocho Lopes, Pedro Daniel 4
- Narváez Padilla, Iván 7
- Pérez García, Adán 7
- Peyrot, Daniel
- Segura Redondo, Manuel
- Serrano García, Humberto
- Torices Hernández, Angélica 10
- Vidal Calés, Daniel
- Sanz García, José Luis
- 1 Sorbonne Universités, CR2P CNRS-MNHN-UPMC Paris 6, Département Histoire de la Terre, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, CP 38, 57 rue Cuvier, Paris, France
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2
Universidad de Alcalá
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- 3 CGUC, Departamento de Ciências da Terra, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
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4
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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- 5 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5276, Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon–Terre, Planètes, Environnement, Université Lyon 1 (Claude Bernard), Villeurbanne Cedex, France
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6
Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
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Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
Lejona, España
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7
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
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- 8 UMR 7179 CNRS/Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Département Ecologie et Gestion de la Biodiversité, 57 rue Cuvier CP-55, Paris, France
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9
Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales
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- 10 Department of Biological Sciences, CW405 Biological Sciences Building, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
ISSN: 1886-7995, 1698-6180
Year of publication: 2015
Issue Title: Dinosaur palaeontology and environment
Volume: 41
Issue: 1
Pages: 83-99
Type: Article
More publications in: Journal of iberian geology: an international publication of earth sciences
Abstract
The Late Cretaceous (Campanian-Maastrichtian) fossil site of Lo Hueco was recently discovered close to the village of Fuentes (Cuenca, Spain) during the cutting of a little hill for installation of the railway of the Madrid-Levante high-speed train. To date, it has yielded a rich collection of well-preserved Cretaceous macrofossils, including plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates. The recovered fossil assemblage is mainly composed of plants, molluscs (bivalves and gastropods), actinopterygians and teleosteans fishes, amphibians, panpleurodiran (bothremydids) and pancryptodiran turtles, squamate lizards, eusuchian crocodyliforms, rhabdodontid ornithopods, theropods (mainly dromaeosaurids), and titanosaur sauropods. This assemblage was deposited in a near-coast continental muddy floodplain crossed by distributary sandy channels, exposed intermittently to brackish or marine and freshwater flooding as well as to partial or total desiccation events. The Konzentrat-Lagerstatt of Lo Hueco constitutes a singular accumulation of fossils representing individuals of some particular lineages of continental tetrapods, especially titanosaurs, eusuchians and bothremydid turtles. In the case of the titanosaurs, the site has yielded multiple partial skeletons in anatomical connection or with a low dispersion of their skeletal elements. A combination of new taxa, new records of taxa previously known in the Iberian Peninsula, and relatively common taxa in the European record compose the Lo Hueco biota. The particular conditions of the fossil site of Lo Hueco and the preliminary results indicate that the analysis of the geological context, the floral and faunal content, and the taphonomical features of the site provide elements that will be especially useful for reassess the evolutionary history of some lineages of European Late Cretaceous reptiles.