Fossils unearthed in northern Spain could shed new light on dinosaur evolution, according to a study published Sunday in the journal Papers in Paleontology. The remains, found by Fidel Torcida Fernandez-Baldor of the Dinosaur Museum of Salas de los Infantes, represent at least five individual animals. The museum specializes in Cretaceous-era fossils.
Researchers, including collaborators from the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, say the bones stood out immediately because of their tiny size. The newly described species, Foskeia pelendonum, measured just over half a meter long—under 20 inches. The genus name Foskeia, from Greek, is interpreted by the university as meaning something like “light foraging.”
Foskeia is an ornithopod, a group of plant-eating, bipedal dinosaurs that includes better-known forms such as Iguanodon. But scientists say this is not simply a miniature version of a familiar ornithopod. “This is not a ‘mini Iguanodon’, it is something fundamentally different … Its anatomy is weird in precisely the kind of way that rewrites evolutionary trees,” said Penelope Cruzado-Caballero of Universidad de La Laguna.
Paleontologists are particularly intrigued by the complexity of Foskeia’s small skull. Marcos Becerra of Universidad Nacional de Córdoba described the skull as “weird and hyper-derived,” noting that miniaturization did not equate to evolutionary simplicity. Paul-Emile Dieudonné of Argentina’s National University of Río Negro, who led the research, emphasized the species’ “extreme smallness” alongside its unexpected cranial innovations.
Thierry Tortosa of the Sainte Victoire Natural Reserve said the discovery “helps fill a 70-million-year gap, a small key that unlocks a vast missing chapter.” The team argues that these fossils demonstrate evolution experimented as radically at small body sizes as at large ones, and that future dinosaur research should pay closer attention to small, fragmentary remains.
The study and related press release note the potential of Foskeia to revise ideas about ornithopod evolution by showing how distinct anatomical specializations can appear in tiny-bodied lineages. Edited by Elizabeth Schumacher.