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A new fossil marine lizard with soft tissues from the Late Cretaceous of southern Italy.

ABSTRACT: A new marine lizard showing exceptional soft tissue preservation was found in Late Cretaceous deposits of the Apulian Platform (Puglia, Italy). Primitivus manduriensis gen. et sp. nov. is not only the first evidence of the presence of dolichosaurs in a southern Italian Carbonate Platform, filling a palaeogeographic gap in the Mediterranean Tethys, but also extends the range of this group to the upper Campanian-lower Maastrichtian. Our parsimony analysis recovers a monophyletic non-ophidian pythonomorph clade, including Tetrapodophis amplectus at the stem of Mosasauroidea?+?Dolichosauridae, which together represent the sister group of Ophidia (modern and fossil snakes). Based on Bayesian inference instead, Pythonomorpha is monophyletic, with Ophidia representing the more deeply nested clade, and the new taxon as basal to all other pythonomorphs. Primitivus displays a fairly conservative morphology in terms of both axial elongation of the trunk and limb reduction, and the coexistence of aquatic adaptations with features hinting at the retention of the ability to move on land suggests a semi-aquatic lifestyle. The exceptional preservation of mineralized muscles, portions of the integument, cartilages and gut content provides unique sources of information about this extinct group of lizards. The new specimen may represent local persistence of a relict dolichosaur population until almost the end of the Cretaceous in the Mediterranean Tethys, and demonstrates the incompleteness of our knowledge of dolichosaur temporal and spatial distributions.

SUBMITTER: Paparella I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6030324 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A new fossil marine lizard with soft tissues from the Late Cretaceous of southern Italy.

Paparella Ilaria I Palci Alessandro A Nicosia Umberto U Caldwell Michael W MW

Royal Society open science 20180620 6

A new marine lizard showing exceptional soft tissue preservation was found in Late Cretaceous deposits of the Apulian Platform (Puglia, Italy). <i>Primitivus manduriensis</i> gen. et sp. nov. is not only the first evidence of the presence of dolichosaurs in a southern Italian Carbonate Platform, filling a palaeogeographic gap in the Mediterranean Tethys, but also extends the range of this group to the upper Campanian-lower Maastrichtian. Our parsimony analysis recovers a monophyletic non-ophidia ...[more]

PMID: 30110414

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Project description:Coelacanths are iconic fishes represented today by a single marine genus. The group was a little bit more diversified in the Mesozoic, with representatives in marine and continental environments in the Late Cretaceous. Here we describe isolated skull bones of the last know freshwater coelacanths found in several fossil sites from the Early Campanian to the Early Maastrichtian of Southern France (in the Departments of Aude, Bouches-du-Rhône, Hérault, and Var). The sample does not allow distinguishing different species, and all material is referred to Axelrodichthys megadromos Cavin, Valentin, Garcia originally described from the locality of Ventabren in Southern France. A reconstruction of the skull is proposed. Previously unrecognized features are described, including parts of the postparietal portion of the skull, of the suspensorium and of the mandible. The new data confirm the assignation of the species to the mawsoniids, and more specifically to Axelrodichthys. A cladistic analysis scoring new character states provides a similar topology than a previous analysis, i.e. A. megadromos is placed in a polytomy with Axelrodichthys araripensis and Lualabaea lerichei, two species from the Early Cretaceous of Brazil and from the Late Jurassic of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, respectively. A. megadromos appears to have been restricted to freshwater environments, to the contrary of oldest Western Gondwanan representatives of the family that were able to live in brackish and marine waters. A. megadromos is the last representative of the mawsoniids and its occurrence in Europe is probably the result of a dispersal event from Western Gondwana that happened somewhen in the Cretaceous. Based on the available data, the mawsoniids went extinct in the mid-Maastrichthian, i.e. before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. But it is possible that the fossil record of this family, which has been only recently recognized in Late Cretaceous European deposits, will geographically and stratigraphically widen with further discoveries.

Dataset Information

A new fossil marine lizard with soft tissues from the Late Cretaceous of southern Italy.

Publications

A new fossil marine lizard with soft tissues from the Late Cretaceous of southern Italy.

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