Dinosaur Palaeontology and their Environment

Abstract

Since 1999 the small town of Salas de los Infantes (Burgos, Spain) has been the meeting point where a palaeontology congress on dinosaurs and their biotic environment has been and continues to be held. This is the only theme conference on Mesozoic dinosaurs that is organized in Spain. The sixth edition was published in September 2013 (VI Jornadas Internacionales de Dinosaurios y su Entorno/VI International Conference on Dinosaurs and their Environment; Torcida Fernandez-Baldor and Huerta, 2013). From its beginning, the symposium has presented studies that reflect the state of research on these fascinating animals, and have showed that several research groups located in different Spanish institutions have grown in number and experience over the years. Currently in Spain, the research work on dinosaurs and other contemporary species that interacted with them during the Mesozoic is internationally recognized for the interest of the studied fossil-sites and for the quality of the developed projects, despite living immersed in an unfavorable time for funding scientific research. This situation has led to the collaboration with specialists from other countries and greater attention in international scientific forums towards the Iberian palaeontological heritage. This special issue Dinosaur Palaeontology and Environment consists of twelve papers dealing with diverse topics on vertebrate palaeobiology. It provides a view of the current state-of-the-art of the vertebrate palaeontology made in Spain. The majority of the contributions are based on fossils found in the Iberian Peninsula and particularly in the Iberian Range, either skeletal bones or tracks and eggshells. The articles are focused on the second half of the Mesozoic: four in the Middle-Late Jurassic or the Jurassic-Cretaceous interval, four in the Early Cretaceous and four in the latest Cretaceous. Topics of study are diverse and range from the diversity of the Late Jurassic turtles of Europe to the evolution of the latest Cretaceous Iberian dinosaurs and associated fauna, passing through new records of crocodylomorphs in Teruel and the palaeobiological implications based on sauropod tracks from Portugal and Spain, among others. Two articles are related to European turtles. In the first one, Perez-Garcia (2015a) revised the British record of Tropidemys, a plesiochelyd genus well known in the Kimmeridgian of Switzerland and Germany. “Pelobatochelys” blakii from the Kimmeridge Clay of Dorset (England) is considered to be a valid species of Tropidemys. Moreover, the presence of Tropidemys in the Lusitanian Basin enlarges the diversity of plesiochelyd turtles in the Late Jurassic of Portugal. In the second paper, the diversity of eucryptodiran turtles in the Late Jurassic of Europe is increased thanks to the revision of two problematic specimens: Enaliochelys chelonia from the Kimmeridgian of Cambridgeshire (England), regarded as a valid taxon by Perez-Garcia (2015b), and “Thalassemys moseri” from the Tithonian of the Oleron Island (France), which Preface Dinosaur Palaeontology and Environment