Could Late Cretaceous sauropod tooth morphotypes provide supporting evidence for faunal connections between North Africa and Southern Europe?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Biogeography, Paleontology, Taxonomy
- Keywords
- Titanosauria, Late Cretaceous, Europe, Africa, teeth, diversity
- Copyright
- © 2018 Holwerda et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Could Late Cretaceous sauropod tooth morphotypes provide supporting evidence for faunal connections between North Africa and Southern Europe? PeerJ Preprints 6:e27286v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27286v1
Abstract
The Cretaceous Kem Kem beds of Morocco and equivalent beds in Algeria have produced a rich fossil assemblage, yielding, amongst others, isolated sauropod teeth, which can be used in species diversity studies. These Albian-Cenomanian (~113 – 93.9 Ma) strata rarely yield sauropod body fossils, therefore, isolated teeth can help to elucidate the faunal assemblages from North Africa, and their relations with those of contemporaneous beds and geographically close assemblages. Eighteen isolated sauropod teeth from three localities (Erfoud and Taouz, Morocco, and Algeria) are studied here, to assess whether the teeth can be ascribed to a specific clade, and whether different tooth morphotypes can be found in the samples. Two general morphotypes are found, based on enamel wrinkling and general tooth morphology. Morphotype I, with mainly rugose enamel wrinkling, pronounced carinae, lemon-shaped to (sub)cylindrical cross-section and mesiodistal tapering towards an apical tip, shows affinities to titanosauriforms and titanosaurs. Morphotype II, characterized by more smooth enamel, cylindrical cross-section, rectangular teeth with no apical tapering and both labial and lingual wear facets, shows similarities to rebbachisaurids. Moreover, similarities are found between these northwest African tooth morphotypes, and tooth morphotypes from titanosaurs and rebbachisaurids from both contemporaneous finds from north and central Africa, as well as from the latest Cretaceous (Campanian-Maastrichtian, 83.6Ma – 66.0Ma) of the Ibero-Armorican Island. These results support previous hypotheses from earlier studies on faunal exchange and continental connections between North Africa and Southern Europe in the Cretaceous.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Table S1. All tooth samples used for the quantitative analysis
Slenderness Index (SI) and Compression Index (CI) from pers. obs. or literature (see references). Tooth sample is mainly Late Jurassic or Cretaceous, with sauropod teeth from Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Africa.