Fossils uncovered in northern Spain could change understandings of dinosaur evolution, according to a study published Sunday in Papers in Paleontology. The material, found by Fidel Torcida Fernandez-Baldor of the Dinosaur Museum of Salas de los Infantes, comes from at least five individual animals. The museum specializes in Cretaceous fossils.
The newly named species, Foskeia pelendonum, is unusually small for an ornithopod, measuring just over half a meter long (under 20 inches). Researchers working with collaborators from the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels say the genus name Foskeia — interpreted by the university as meaning something like light foraging in Greek — reflects its diminutive size and presumed ecology.
Although ornithopods are typically thought of as medium to large bipedal herbivores such as Iguanodon, the team stresses that Foskeia is not merely a shrunken version of a familiar species. Penelope Cruzado-Caballero of Universidad de La Laguna says its anatomy departs sharply from known ornithopod patterns and has the potential to alter branching relationships in evolutionary trees.
Paleontologists were especially surprised by the complexity of the small skull. Marcos Becerra of Universidad Nacional de Córdoba describes the skull as highly derived, arguing that miniaturization in this lineage did not produce anatomical simplification. Paul-Emile Dieudonné of the National University of Río Negro, who led the research, highlighted the combination of extreme smallness and novel cranial features as particularly significant.
Thierry Tortosa of the Sainte Victoire Natural Reserve added that the discovery helps bridge a roughly 70-million-year gap in the fossil record, calling the find a small key to a much larger missing chapter. The authors contend that these remains show evolution experimented dramatically at small body sizes as well as at large ones, and they urge future work to pay closer attention to small, fragmentary fossils that have often been overlooked.
The study and its accompanying press release suggest Foskeia could prompt revisions to ideas about ornithopod diversity and evolution by demonstrating how distinctive anatomical specializations can evolve in tiny-bodied lineages. Edited by Elizabeth Schumacher.