Penélope Cruzado-Caballero

Universidad Nacional de Río Negro-CONICET · Instituto de Investigaciones en Paleontología y Geología (CONICET-UNRN)

In the latest Maastrichtian, the European hadrosauroid fauna was more diverse than those of North America and Asia. The European record of hadrosaurid dentaries is an example of this diversity, and most of the sites with mandibular remains are located in the Ibero-Armorican Realm. Within the Iberian Peninsula, most of the remains are located in the...

After the success of the first two editions of the Palaeontological Virtual Congress in 2019 (first PVC) and 2021 (second PVC; Crespo & Manzanares 2019; Crespo & Citton 2021), we have decided to try to replicate the success with a third meeting of the PVC (Fig. 1). The appearance of new applications and technological advances has played a crucial r...

In the dusk of the Mesozoic, advanced duck-billed dinosaurs (Hadrosauridae) were so successful that they likely outcompeted other herbivores, contributing to declines in dinosaur diversity. From Laurasia, hadrosaurids dispersed widely, colonizing Africa, South America, and, allegedly, Antarctica. Here, we present the first species of a duck-billed...

Los Hadrosauroideos fueron un diverso grupo de dinosaurios herbívoros que aparecieron a mediados del Cretácico y sobrevivieron hasta el final del Cretácico Superior. Los más derivados se incluyen en Hadrosauridae, compuesta por las subfamilias Saurolophinae y Lambeosaurinae. Su gran capacidad de dispersión se ve reflejada en su colonización de Laur...

Studies of the paleopathology of the vertebrae provide an interesting, oblique approach to their paleobiology and even paleoethology. They tell us about possible ethological causes such as accidental blows with objects, social interactions within a group, and defense against predators, etc. There are numerous works on the anatomical and phylogeneti...

In the dusk of the dinosaur era, the advanced duck-billed dinosaurs (Family Hadrosauridae) are thought to have outcompeted other herbivores, making ecosystems less diverse and more vulnerable to the Cretaceous-Paleogene asteroid impact. They were also among the first terrestrial organisms to disperse from North America into South America. Here, we...

The emergence of new applications and technological advances has opened new and wider pathways for people to ensure effective science communication. This has become more significant after more than two years of difficulties and restrictions due to the COVID-19 epidemiological crisis, in which online platforms gained great relevance and proved key t...

Two eggs (L29 and N28) were recovered in the Holocene site of Lobos 3, (Islote de Lobos, north Fuerteventura, Canary Islands), the site has been interpreted as a purple dye workshop from the Early Roman Empire Epoch. For the first time, eggs from a Holocene deposit of the Canary Islands have been analyzed in terms of size, shape, and biomineral str...

The diversity of the Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian to Maastrichtian) crocodyliforms in Argentina is represented by several families of notosuchians (Notosuchidae, Comahuesuchidae, Baurusuchidae, Peirosauridae), and basal mesoeucrocodylian taxa. Most species (such as Neuquensuchus universitas, Notosuchus terrestris, Comahuesuchus brachybuccalis, Cyno...

This chapter aims to provide an overview of the state of knowledge on non-avian dinosaur paleoneurology, throughout the history and synthesis of recent advances in the field. Today, the endocranial morphology of approximately 150 dinosaur taxa has been described using natural or artificial cranial endocasts. They represent all major clades, althoug...

A revision of Renichnus arcuatus Mayoral, 1987, the vermetid attachment etching trace fossil (fixichnia), is presented here with an emended diagnosis. Renichnus arcuatus should be used only for nested reniform depressions arranged in linear series or solitary ones. A new ichnotaxon, Santichnus mayorali ichnogen. et ichnosp. nov., is described to na...

We studied a Middle Pleistocene molluscan association from northern Tenerife. It was composed of 14 species, all found in the TL-1 and TL-2 stratigraphic beds of the middle Pleistocene Unit I. The families present were Helicidae, Enidae with two new species, Pomatiidae, Canariellidae, Vitrinidae and Geomitridae. For the Geometric Morphometrics (GM)...

An iconic, insular, endemic genus of lizards (Gallotia) is present on the Canary Islands (Spain), comprising gigantic to smaller-sized species. Despite numerous studies on various biological aspects of this genus, the osteological knowledge available is scarce. This makes it difficult to identify to species level the bone remains recovered from bot...

Bioerosions produced by the osteophagous diet of animals that fed on dinosaur bones are very scarce in the European fossil record. Herein we present bioerosion on hadrosaurid remains from the Maastrichtian Tremp Formation of the Pyrenean Basin, which is only the second such case recorded from the Iberian-Occitan Plate besides a sauropod from the Ju...

Ornithischians form a large clade of globally distributed Mesozoic dinosaurs, and represent one of their three major radiations. Throughout their evolutionary history, exceeding 134 million years, ornithischians evolved considerable morphological disparity, expressed especially through the cranial and osteodermal features of their most distinguisha...

Bats are one of the most abundant and important mammals in ecosystems. However, their fossil record is scarce and fragile, making them difficult to find. Accordingly, there is no record of this group in the volcanic islands of the mid-Atlantic Ocean apart from the Canary Islands. This paper studies the first bat fossil record of the Canary Islands...

The genus Gallotia is an endemic lizard clade from the volcanic archipelago of the Canary Islands (Spain). This clade has five extant and extinct giant species distributed over just five islands in the archipelago: El Hierro, La Gomera, La Palma, Tenerife and Gran Canaria. On the island of El Hierro, remains of several giant species of Gallotia hav...

Nowadays, 3D methodologies have become an indispensable tool for different fields of palaeontology, and a remarkable example is the photogrammetry (Cunningham, 2021). The models created with this technique offer potential advantages in conservation and teaching palaeontology: they are cheap to produce, can be easily shared and allow rare and delica...

We describe and incorporate fragmentary new cranial and postcranial materials of hadrosaurid ornithopods into the non-avian dinosaur assemblage of the Upper Cretaceous (Coniacian–Maastrichtian) Lago Colhué Huapi Formation of central Patagonia, south-central Chubut Province, Argentina. The fossils come from the upper part of the formation, probably...

Throughout the evolutionary history of Avialae, several members of this clade have evolved into giant forms, in different time periods and ecological contexts. In Europe, the first birds that show this condition, the Gargantuaviidae, occur during the Late Cretaceous (late Campanian–early Maastrichtian), but it is during the Paleogene when more grou...

The South-Pyrenean Basin (northeastern Spain) has yielded a rich and diverse record of Upper Cretaceous (uppermost Campanian−uppermost Maastrichtian) vertebrate fossils, including the remains of some of the last European dinosaurs prior to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event. In this work, we update and characterize the vertebrate foss...

The paleopathological record provides relevant information about paleobiology and paleoecology of fossil organisms. Based on the information obtained from paleopathologies, it is possible to infer how these injuries affected inter- and intraspecific relationships among organisms, and their interaction with the environment. For instance, fractures a...

Teeth with split carina is an uncommon trait recorded in archosaurs with ziphodont dentition (laterally compressed teeth bearing serrated margins). This condition has been reported in few theropod dinosaurs (Allosaurus, tyrannosaurids, dromaeosaurids and carcharodontosaurids) and in one Triassic phytosaur. Here, we report by the first time a split...

This work attempts at providing a revised framework for ornithischian phylogeny, based on an exhaustive data compilation of already published analyses, a critical re-evaluation of osteological characters and an in-depth checking of characters scoring to fix mistakes that have accumulated in previous analyses; we have also included recently describe...

The study of palaeopathology provides valuable information about injury and behaviour in extinct organisms. Appendicular pathologies are interesting as they directly affect mobility and therefore the ability of an animal to survive. Here, the injuries recorded in the left pes of the neornithischian Othnielosaurus consors are described. The implicat...

The Canary Islands are an Atlantic archipelago known for its high number of endemic species. Among the most known endemic vertebrate species are the giant lizards of the genus Gallotia. We describe the cranial osteology of the first almost complete and articulated fossil skull of the taxon Gallotia auaritae, recovered from the lower-middle Pleistoc...

En las últimas décadas se han registrado varios sitios con cáscaras, huevos, y nidos de dinosaurios en los bajos interiores de la provincia de Río Negro. En 2018 fueron hallados dos grupos de huevos en la localidad de Bajo Trapalcó (Río Negro). Los huevos se localizan en el yacimiento Garrido Inferior cerca del Puesto González (equivalente a los ya...

Ornithopods are traditionally a poorly known clade of dinosaurs within the Upper Cretaceous fossil record of Argentina. In the last few years, the number of discoveries has increased significantly in the out-crops near Rincón de los Sauces village (Neuquén province), where remains have appeared in two different formations (Plottier and Bajo de la C...

During recent decades, the Canaries have become a source of terrestrial tortoise fossils, both osteological material from Tenerife and Gran Canaria islands or fossil eggs from Lanzarote and Fuerteventura islands. These remains led to the description of two extinct tortoise species: Geochelone burchardi Ahl, 1926 from Tenerife and Geochelone vulcani...

The endocranial morphology of Secernosaurus koerneri (= Kritosaurus australis junior synonym), a hadrosaurid from the Upper Cretaceous of Argentina, was studied using latex and digital endocasts based on three fragmentary braincases. This new information allowed describing and comparing the neuroanatomy of this South American representative of the...

The endocranial morphology of Secernosaurus koerneri (Brett-Surman, 1979; = Kritosaurus australis, Bonaparte, Franchi, Powell and Sepulveda, 1984) from Los Alamitos Formation (Late Campanian-early Maastrichtian), was studied using CT-scans of three fragmentary braincases (MACN-RN 02, 142 and 144). With this information we obtained a hypothetical br...

The complete skull of the type specimen of Gasparinisaura cincosaltensis (MUCPv-208)-a small ornithopod from the Upper Cretaceous of Argentina-was CT scanned using a medical tomographer. The markedly small size of the skull plus the lateromedial deformation prevented the observation of the endocranial cavity in the CT data set, and further neuroana...

In the last decades, the Argentinian ornithopod record has been increased with new and diverse bone remains found along all the Upper Cretaceous. Most of them are very incomplete and represent taxa of different size. As result, the studies about the palaeobiodiversity of the Ornithopoda clade in South America are complex. In this paper, new postcra...

Purpose Although the hadrosaurid record is more abundant in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere, it is in Argentina that most remains have been discovered, specifically in Patagonia. This record is characterized by an extensive geographical distribution of sites, some of them with abundant remains, many of which have been assign...

The Gondwanan hadrosaurid dinosaur record is relatively poorly known and very complicated. A new hadrosaurid, Bonapartesaurus rionegrensis, gen. et sp. nov., from the late Campanian–early Maastrichtian of the Salitral Moreno site, Argentina, is characterized by the following combination of characters: the ratio between the height of the neural spin...

Aragosaurus-IUCA (University of Zaragoza) is a research group in vertebrate paleontology, originally focused in two lines of work: Mesozoic vertebrates from the Iberian Peninsula and Patagonia, and Pleistocene vertebrates from Spain (especially the small vertebrates of the Atapuerca locality). Lately, the group has developed a notable labor prospec...

The continental facies of the Tremp Basin (northeastern Spain), together with other European regions such as Provence (France) and the Haţeg Basin (Romania), contain one of the best continental vertebrate record from the Upper Cretaceous of Europe. Therefore, this basin of the southeastern Pyrenees is an exceptional place to study the extinction of...

Ornithopods are the least known dinosaurs within the Upper Cretaceous record of Argentina. For this reason every new record is very important to know their evolution in South America. Here, we describe a new remain of an indeterminate ornithopod recovered in the Petrobrasaurus quarry of the Puesto Hernández area, northeastern Neuquén province (Arge...

Ichnologic and sedimentologic studies of the Lajas Formation (Middle Jurassic) in Sierra de la Vaca Muerta, allowed the recognition of two different types of deltaic mouth bars, each of them showing trace fossil suites with different characteristics. Type I deltaic mouth bars consist of fine to coarse sandstones and fine conglomerates completed rew...

The Late Cretaceous in the westernmost sector of the External Sierras (Sto. Domingo range) is poorly represented but displays transitional facies where remains of continental and marine fossil vertebrates (Osteichthyes, Chondrichthyes and Dinosauria) were recently discovered. This paper introduces the preliminary magnetostratigraphic results carrie...

In recent years a rich and diverse fauna of hadrosaurid dinosaurs has been described in the Upper Cretaceous of the Pyrenees. Recent fieldwork carried out in the upper Maastrichtian levels of the Tremp Formation, in the south-central Pyrenees (province of Huesca, northeastern Spain), has allowed us to recover diminutive fossil bones referable to ha...

The neuroanatomy of hadrosaurid dinosaurs is well known from North America and Asia. In Europe only a few cranial remains have been recovered that include the braincase. Arenysaurus is the first European endocast for which the paleoneuroanatomy has been studied. The resulting data have enabled us to draw ontogenetic, phylogenetic and functional inf...

The neuroanatomy of hadrosaurid dinosaurs is well known from North America and Asia. In Europe only a few cranial remains have been recovered with the braincase. Arenysaurus is the first European endocast for which the paleoneuroanatomy has been studied. The resulting data have enabled us to draw ontogenetic, phylogenetic and functional inferences....

The neuroanatomy of hadrosaurid dinosaurs is well known from North America and Asia. In Europe only a few cranial remains have been recovered with the braincase. Arenysaurus is the first European endocast for which the paleoneuroanatomy has been studied. The resulting data have enabled us to draw ontogenetic, phylogenetic and functional inferences....

Arenysaurus ardevoli is a lambeosaurine hadrosaurid from the late Maastrichtian of Ar´en (Huesca, northern Spain) that has recently been described. The holotype is the first and the most complete lambeosaurine with a braincase from Europe. In this paper, we present a complete description of the postcranial skeleton, which was poorly described when...

Arenysaurus ardevoli is known from a rich hadrosaurid fauna from the Iberian Peninsula. Its braincase is the only one discovered of an European lambeosaurine. Recently, the cranial material was scanned using industrial computed tomography (CT). After segmentation, using the visualization software Avizo, we obtained the three-dimensional endocast re...

El interés por los vertebrados fósiles es cada vez mayor, y raro es el día que no surge alguna noticia de un nuevo descubrimiento, especialmente en dinosaurios. Los investigadores en Paleontología nos dedicamos a reconstruir los ecosistemas del pasado y conocer su evolución. El grupo Aragosaurus es un equipo de investigación de la Facultad de Cienc...

A partially articulated postcranial skeleton of a small ornithischian dinosaur, Gideonmantellia amosanjuanae nov. gen. et sp., from the Early Cretaceous of Galve (Teruel province, Spain) is described. It was recovered in an outcrop of fluvial red clays from the Camarillas Formation, which is Barremian in age. This partial skeleton is recognised as...