Abstract
During the latest Cretaceous, the European Archipelago was characterized by highly fragmented landmasses hosting putative dwarfed, insular dinosaurs, claimed as fossil evidence of the “island rule”. The Villaggio del Pescatore quarry (north-eastern Italy) stands as the most informative locality within the palaeo-Mediterranean region and represents the first, multi-individual Konservat-Lagerstätte type dinosaur-bearing locality in Italy. The site is here critically re-evaluated as early Campanian in age, thus preceding the final fragmentation stages of the European Archipelago, including all other European localities preserving hypothesized dwarfed taxa. New skeletal remains allowed osteohistological analyses on the hadrosauroid Tethyshadros insularis indicating subadult features in the type specimen whereas a second, herein newly described, larger individual is likely somatically mature. A phylogenetic comparative framework places the body-size of T. insularis in range with other non-hadrosaurid Eurasian hadrosauroids, rejecting any significant evolutionary trend towards miniaturisation in this clade, confuting its ‘pygmy’ status, and providing unmatched data to infer environmentally-driven body-size trends in Mesozoic dinosaurs.
Highlights
During the latest Cretaceous, the European Archipelago was characterized by highly fragmented landmasses hosting putative dwarfed, insular dinosaurs, claimed as fossil evidence of the “island rule”
The latest Cretaceous Mediterranean archipelago, a complex set of carbonate platforms, peninsulas, and islands in the western margin of the Tethys Ocean, bracketed by Laurasian and Gondwanan continental remains of Pangea, represents a long-lasting challenge for palaeogeographers and palaeontologists focused on non-marine vertebrates, their evolution and biogeography[1]
Most of vertebrate remains documenting the evolution of this unique context are confined to the Adriatic Carbonatic Platforms (AdCP), a vast domain characterized by carbonate platforms severed by deeper marine areas
Summary
During the latest Cretaceous, the European Archipelago was characterized by highly fragmented landmasses hosting putative dwarfed, insular dinosaurs, claimed as fossil evidence of the “island rule”. Terms as ‘isolated landmasses’ or ‘island’ should be used cautiously in the case of the Villaggio del Pescatore locality (VdP ; Fig. 1) and other AdCP sites to avoid a potential misinterpretation of the regional biogeographic relevance of its fossil fauna[6] In this context, Italy plays a key role due to its geographical position and by preserving the sole latest Cretaceous dinosaur-dominated site in the AdCP system, namely the VdP (Fig. 1). Novel geological and fossil data from the VdP presented here represent the first set of evidence to test such hypotheses and provide insights into claimed insular adaptations and body size evolution in the latest Cretaceous dinosaur fauna of Europe. Our results challenge previous hypotheses supporting events of dwarfism among ornithischians during the Late Cretaceous and support the presence of plesiomorphically average-sized hadrosauroids invading the Tethyan domain from Eurasia and distinct from the later and more fragmentated, insular environment of the Maastrichtian European archipelago
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