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Novel record of placodont remains including a Henodus cranium from the Upper Triassic Silves Group of the Algarve, southern Portugal
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Resumo(s)
Recent fieldwork in the Upper Triassic deposits of the Silves Group in the Algarve, southern Portugal revealed novel cyamodontid placodont material. The collection includes a partial skull and numerous isolated armor plates from four localities in Silves and Loulé municipalities. The skull shows a strong affinity to henodontid placodonts, especially to Henodus chelyops from Tübingen-Lustnau in Germany. It shares features such as a rectangular outline of the cranium, occurrence of a broad spatulate rostrum, and toothless maxillae with curved longitudinally extending grooves. The only unambiguous difference observed pertains to the more robust and convex snout shape of the new specimen. Based on these multiple similarities, the specimen is identified as Henodus sp., but poor preservation prevents species-level identification. The new specimen from Portugal represents the second record of Henodus and illustrates a wider geographic distribution of that genus, extending beyond the Germanic Basin and reaching coastal areas near the westernmost branch of the Neotethys. The age of the deposits where the cranium was found is not well-established but refers to a time interval within the upper Carnian–Rhaetian, suggesting the specimen may be younger than other henodontid records. The novel Henodus material found in the continental, but likely the near-coastal depositional setting, concurs with the known records of brackish to the freshwater habitat of the other henodontid placodonts. The occurrence of abundant armor plates assigned to Cyamodontidae at multiple sites and stratigraphic horizons indicates that placodonts were common in the south Iberian margin.
Descrição
Funding Information: We would like to thank anonymous reviewers for providing a detailed and very constructive review, contributing to the enhancement of the manuscript. We express our great gratitude to J. Graça for donating the skull ML. A9182 to the Museu Municipal de Loulé, making this study possible. Without this donation our knowledge of placodont material from the Algarve would be much poorer. We want to thank Geoparque Algarvensis for the support and promotion of this work. We want to thank Dinopark Lourinhã for enabling access to Dinopark’s preparatory lab, helping in the process of preparation of the fossil material. We thank S. Mateus, J. Marinheiro, and V. López Rojas for support during the preparation in Dinopark Lourinhã as well as Nathalie Rodrigues for assistance in the preparation of armor plate material at the Museum of Lourinhã. We would also like to thank C. Pessoa for helping with XRF analysis at the Departamento de Ciências da Terra of Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. We are also grateful to J. Kowalski and P. Janecki for providing illustration of Henodus. IW was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant: WE5440/6-1) as well as by E. and W. Datz-Stiftung. Publisher Copyright: © 2025. Maciej Ruciński, Hugo Campos, Octávio Mateus, Ingmar Werneburg.
Palavras-chave
Palaeontology