Abstract
The Late Cretaceous dinosaur record in southern South America has been improved recently; particularly with findings from Chorrillo and Cerro Fortaleza formations, both bearing ankylosaur remains, a clade that was not previously recorded in the Austral Basin. The dinosaur fauna of the type locality of Cerro Fortaleza Formation is known from -and biased to- large-sized sauropod remains and a single described taxon, the titanosaur Dreadnoughtus schrani. Here, we report the taxonomic composition of a site preserving thirteen isolated teeth and several osteoderms belonging to three dinosaur clades (Abelisauridae, Titanosauria, and Nodosauridae), and at least one clade of notosuchian crocodyliforms (Peirosauridae). They come from sediments positioned at the mid-section of the Cerro Fortaleza Formation, which is Campanian-Maastrichtian in age, adding valuable information to the abundance and biodiversity of this Cretaceous ecosystem. Since non-titanosaur dinosaur bones are almost absent in the locality, the teeth presented here provide a window onto the archosaur biodiversity of the Late Cretaceous in southern Patagonia. The nodosaurid tooth and small armor ossicles represent the first record of ankylosaurs for this stratigraphic unit. The peirosaurid material also represents the most austral record of the clade in South America.
Highlights
The Cerro Fortaleza Formation (Campanian-Maastrichtian in age) crops out along the West and East margins of La Leona River, and south of Lago Viedma, Santa Cruz Province, Argentina (Fig 1)
The aim of this study is to describe the morphology of the isolated dinosaur and crocodyliform teeth from a Late Cretaceous microremains site
The tooth sample from Cerro Fortaleza locality is taxonomically rich, representing different dinosaur and crocodyliform clades that probably cohabitated the same bioma during the Late Cretaceous
Summary
The Cerro Fortaleza Formation (Campanian-Maastrichtian in age) crops out along the West and East margins of La Leona River, and south of Lago Viedma, Santa Cruz Province, Argentina (Fig 1). A recent sedimentological analysis [2] included the Cerro Fortaleza, La Anita, La Irene, and Chorrillo (another dinosaur-bearing unit [9,10]) formations as lithologically similar beds under the denomination “Uppermost Cretaceous Continental Deposits” Regardless of their names, the dinosaur-bearing units were generally considered as Campanian-Maastrichtian [4,6,11,12,13,14,15,16]
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