Theropod tooth morphotypes from Late Jurassic Andrés fossil site in Portugal (free pdf)

[Ben Creisler]

Ben Creisler

bcre...@gmail.com

A new paper:

Free pdf:

Elisabete Malafaia, Filipa Batista, Bruno Maggia, Carolina S. Marques, Fernando Escaso, Pedro Dantas, and Francisco Ortega (2025)
Theropod tooth morphotypes from the Andrés fossil site: insights into a highly diverse fauna of European Late Jurassic carnivore dinosaurs.
Palaeontologia Electronica 28(3): a53
doi: https://doi.org/10.26879/1504
https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2025/5721-diversity-of-theropod-teeth-from-the-upper-jurassic-of-portugal

Free pdf:
https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/pdfs/1504.pdf


The Andrés fossil site (Pombal, Portugal) is well known by its abundant record of fossils attributed to the theropod Allosaurus. However, a diversity of other vertebrates has also been identified in this Upper Jurassic locality, including fishes, lepidosaurs, crocodylomorphs, pterosaurs and different dinosaur groups. The Late Jurassic vertebrate fossil record in other European areas is scarce and mostly represented by isolated teeth, highlighting the importance of detailed descriptions and comprehensive analyses of these fossils to approach the faunal diversity in these landmasses. Here, an assemblage of isolated theropod teeth collected from Tithonian levels at the Andrés locality in the Lusitanian Basin is described. A combination of different methods, including discriminant and cladistic analyses as well as machine learning tools, was used to assess their taxonomic identification. These analyses allowed to characterize ten different morphotypes attributed to Allosaurus and to several groups of small coelurosaurian theropods, including indeterminate Coelurosauria, early-branching Tyrannosauroidea, Neocoelurosauria, Velociraptorinae, and Dromaeosaurinae. This study revealed an unusually diverse theropod dinosaur fauna, showing some similarities to that described from the Kimmeridgian lignite levels of the famous Guimarota fossil site (Leiria, Portugal). Other tooth morphotypes from different Upper Jurassic European localities are comparable to those described at the Andrés fossil site, suggesting similarities in theropod faunal composition. The study of this large assemblage of isolated theropod teeth allow us to better understand the palaeobiodiversity, paleogeographic distribution, and evolutionary history of the Late Jurassic theropod fauna of the Iberian Peninsula and other correlative European areas.

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