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.
Highlights
The Upper Cretaceous (Campanian-Maastrichtian) marly mudstone fossil site of Lo Hueco is located near the village of Fuentes, Cuenca Province, Spain (Fig. 1)
Squamate remains are relatively rare at Lo Hueco, but the specimens are recognized as highly diverse when compared to the available record from the Late Cretaceous of Europe
The presence of two titanosaurian taxa in Lo Hueco that can be distinguished from the well-known species Lirainosaurus astibiae corroborates the rise of the sauropod diversity from the Late Cretaceous of the Iberian Peninsula, as suggested by some previous studies on the biota of Lo Hueco (Díez Díaz et al, 2012b)
Summary
The Upper Cretaceous (Campanian-Maastrichtian) marly mudstone fossil site of Lo Hueco is located near the village of Fuentes, Cuenca Province, Spain (Fig. 1). It was discovered in 2007 during the cutting of a little hill for installation of the Madrid-Levante train railway. When the paleontological activity began, the fossil beds had already been partially affected by the earthworks and the presence of a huge amount of macrofossils in the site was evident. Under these conditions, both paleontological excavation and civil work planning significantly conditioned each other. The present paper outlines the still very preliminary results obtained to date by the multidisciplinary group working on the analysis of the Lo Hueco collection
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