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1 Island Life in the Cretaceous View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Repository of the Academy's Library Island life in the Cretaceous - faunal composition, biogeography, evolution, and extinction of land-living vertebrates on the Late Cretaceous European archipelago Zoltán Csiki-Sava 1, Eric Buffetaut 2, Attila Ősi 3, Xabier Pereda-Suberbiola 4, Stephen L. Brusatte 5 * 1 Department of Geology, Faculty of Geology and Geophysics, University of Bucharest, 1 N. Bălcescu Blvd, 010041 Bucharest, Romania 2 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 8538, Laboratoire de Géologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France 3 MTA-ELTE Lendület Dinosaur Research Group, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/c, Budapest, 1117, Hungary 4 Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Facultad de Ciencia y Tecnología, Departamento de Estratigrafía y Paleontología, Apartado 644, 48080 Bilbao, Spain 5 School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Grant Institute, King's Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JW, UK * All authors contributed equally to this paper. Corresponding author: Zoltán Csiki-Sava ([email protected]) Abstract: The Late Cretaceous was a time of tremendous global change, as the final stages of the Age of Dinosaurs were shaped by climate and sea level fluctuations and witness to marked paleogeographic and faunal changes, before the end-Cretaceous bolide impact. The terrestrial fossil record of Late Cretaceous Europe is becoming increasingly better understood, based largely on intensive fieldwork over the past two decades, promising new insights into latest Cretaceous faunal evolution. We review the terrestrial Late Cretaceous record from Europe and discuss its importance for understanding the paleogeography, ecology, evolution, and extinction of land-dwelling vertebrates. We review the major Late Cretaceous faunas from Austria, Hungary, France, Spain, Portugal, and Romania, as well as more fragmentary records from elsewhere in Europe. We discuss the paleogeographic background and history of assembly of these faunas, and argue that they are comprised of an endemic ‘core’ supplemented with various immigration waves. These faunas lived on an island archipelago, and we describe how this insular setting led to ecological peculiarities such as low diversity, a preponderance of primitive taxa, and marked changes in morphology (particularly body size dwarfing). We conclude by discussing the importance of the European record in understanding the end-Cretaceous extinction and show that there is no clear evidence that dinosaurs or other groups were undergoing long-term declines in Europe prior to the bolide impact. Keywords Late Cretaceous, Europe, island, faunal evolution, paleobiogeography, extinction Contents Introduction Europe in the Late Cretaceous: Paleogeography and Paleotectonics of an Ancient Island Archipelago The Late Cretaceous Continental Vertebrate Faunas of Europe 1 A. A General Overview Cenomanian Turonian Coniacian Santonian Campanian Maastrichtian B. Santonian of Hungary (Iharkút and Ajka) History of research Geological setting Faunal overview C. Early Campanian of eastern Austria (Muthmannsdorf) History of research Geological setting Faunal overview D. Santonian–Maastrichtian, southern France History of research Geological setting Faunal overview E. Campanian–Maastrichtian, Spain and Portugal History of research Geological setting Faunal overview F. Coniacian and Campanian–Maastrichtian, Romania History of research Geological setting Faunal overview Discussion and Conclusions Late Cretaceous faunal evolution and paleobiogeography Faunal composition: distribution, endemism and provinciality Faunal composition and evolution: the history of research Faunal composition and evolution: the old European core Faunal composition and evolution: the Asiamerican kinship Faunal composition and evolution: the Gondwanan immigrants Interactions between Late Cretaceous Europe and other bioprovinces – origin, timing and route of faunal connections Late Cretaceous faunal evolution in continental Europe Late Cretaceous island life Insularity-related features of the European Late Cretaceous vertebrate assemblages Insularity-related adaptations of the European Late Cretaceous island-dwelling taxa Events at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary in the European Archipelago Dinosaurs Other vertebrates Patterns of extinction and survival near the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary Acknowledgments References 2 Introduction The most iconic picture of a Late Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystem is probably Tyrannosaurus attacking Triceratops on the vast, fertile floodplains of North America, as a suite of smaller dinosaurs, mammals, crocodyliforms, turtles, and pterosaurs look on. This vignette has been repeated often in movies and museum exhibits, and for good reason: the terrestrial fossil record of the latest Cretaceous in North America is the richest and most complete of anywhere in the world (Weishampel et al. 2004). For this reason, much of our understanding of how dinosaurs and other organisms were living, interacting, and evolving during the final few million years before the K-Pg extinction comes from careful study of the North American record. In recent years, however, the fossil record of the latest Cretaceous in Europe has improved tremendously. Large-scale fieldwork programs in France, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, and Spain have revealed a wealth of new taxa, ranging from carnivorous, duck- billed, and long-necked dinosaurs to mammals, crocodyliforms, turtles, pterosaurs, squamates, and numerous kinds of fishes. The phylogenetic relationships and paleobiology of many of these taxa have been studied in detail, leading to a better understanding of their evolution and behavior, and how they interacted with each other to form complex terrestrial ecosystems during the final stages of the Age of Dinosaurs. As we learn more about the European faunas, it is becoming increasingly clear that their evolution, paleogeographic composition, and ecologies were complex, and have an important story to tell in regards to how dinosaurs and other organisms were changing before the end-Cretaceous bolide impact. In this paper, we review the current state of the European Late Cretaceous terrestrial fossil record (Fig. 1). We begin with a paleogeographic overview of Europe during this time, which describes the island archipelago layout of Europe during the high sea levels of the terminal Cretaceous. We then outline the major faunas from Hungary, France, Iberia, and Romania, introduced by a brief overview of the lesser-known faunas from elsewhere in Europe. Next, we discuss the paleogeographic history and assembly of the European faunas, showing that they are a mixture of an endemic ‘core’ augmented with various immigrants from northern and southern continents. This is followed by a discussion about what the European faunas tell us about insular, island communities and evolution during the Mesozoic. Finally, we briefly review the relevance of the European faunas for understanding the end- Cretaceous extinction, and argue that although Europe had experienced some ecological reorganization during the waning years of the Cretaceous, there is no strong evidence that dinosaurs and other organisms gradually wasted away to extinction. In fact, there is now evidence that non-avian dinosaurs were present in Europe within 400,000 years of the K-Pg boundary, the finest resolution permitted by the current fossil record. Institutional abbreviations: EME – Transylvanian Museum Society, Cluj-Napoca, Romania; HUE – ‘Lo Hueco’ collection, Museo de las Ciencias de Castilla-La Mancha, Cuenca, Spain; LPB (FGGUB) – Laboratory of Paleontology, Faculty of Geology and Geophysics, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania; MC – Musée de Cruzy, Cruzy, France; MCDRD – Muzeul Civilizaţiei Dacice şi Romane, Deva, Romania; MCNA – Museo de Ciencias Naturales de Álava/Arabako Natur Zientzien Museoa, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; MDE – Musée des Dinosaures d'Espéraza, Espéraza, France; MFGI – Geological and Geophysical Institute of Hungary, Budapest, Hungary; MGUV, Museo de Geología de la Universidad de Valencia, Burjassot, Spain; MHNAix – Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle d'Aix- en-Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France; MPZ – Museo de Ciencias Naturales (formerly Museo Paleontológico) de la Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain; MTM – Hungarian 3 Natural History Museum,Budapest, Hungary; NHMUK – Natural History Museum, London, UK; PIUW – Paläontologisches Institut, University of Wien, Wien, Austria; UBB – Paleontological Collection, Faculty of Biology and Geology, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj- Napoca, Romania. Europe in the Late Cretaceous: Paleogeography and Paleotectonics of an Ancient Island Archipelago One widely acknowledged key feature of Late Cretaceous Europe is its extremely discontinuous continental paleogeography, a two-fold consequence of early Mesozoic supercontinent break-up. Fragmentation of Pangea started in the Triassic, but sped up starting with the Jurassic–Early Cretaceous (e.g., Golonka and Bocharova 2000; Seton et al. 2012). This process led to increased rates of seafloor spreading, and development – including in the Mediterranean Tethys area – of several second-order extensional areas (‘oceanic throughs’) that split off continental crust slivers from the major continental landmasses. Sea floor spreading peaked during the ‘mid’-Cretaceous, and steered some of the most important Phanerozoic sea-level highstands
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