scholarly journals Taphonomy and taxonomy of a juvenile lambeosaurine (Ornithischia: Hadrosauridae) bonebed from the late Campanian Wapiti Formation of northwestern Alberta, Canada

PeerJ ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. e11290
Author(s):  
Brayden Holland ◽  
Phil R. Bell ◽  
Federico Fanti ◽  
Samantha M. Hamilton ◽  
Derek W. Larson ◽  
...  

Hadrosaurid (duck-billed) dinosaur bonebeds are exceedingly prevalent in upper Cretaceous (Campanian–Maastrichtian) strata from the Midwest of North America (especially Alberta, Canada, and Montana, U.S.A) but are less frequently documented from more northern regions. The Wapiti Formation (Campanian–Maastrichtian) of northwestern Alberta is a largely untapped resource of terrestrial palaeontological information missing from southern Alberta due to the deposition of the marine Bearpaw Formation. In 2018, the Boreal Alberta Dinosaur Project rediscovered the Spring Creek Bonebed, which had been lost since 2002, along the northern bank of the Wapiti River, southwest of Grande Prairie. Earlier excavations and observations of the Spring Creek Bonebed suggested that the site yielded young hadrosaurines. Continued work in 2018 and 2019 recovered ~300 specimens that included a minimum of eight individuals, based on the number of right humeri. The morphology of several recovered cranial elements unequivocally supports lambeosaurine affinities, making the Spring Creek sample the first documented occurrence of lambeosaurines in the Wapiti Formation. The overall size range and histology of the bones found at the site indicate that these animals were uniformly late juveniles, suggesting that age segregation was a life history strategy among hadrosaurids. Given the considerable size attained by the Spring Creek lambeosaurines, they were probably segregated from the breeding population during nesting or caring for young, rather than due to different diet and locomotory requirements. Dynamic aspects of life history, such as age segregation, may well have contributed to the highly diverse and cosmopolitan nature of Late Cretaceous hadrosaurids.

1995 ◽  
Vol 69 (6) ◽  
pp. 1191-1194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive E. Coy

Spiral coprolites from the Upper Cretaceous of North America are poorly known. Enterospirae (fossilized intestines) reported from the Upper Cretaceous Niobrara Formation of western Kansas (Stewart, 1978) were disputed by McAllister (1985), who felt they represented spiral coprolites similar to those described from the Permian by Neumayer (1904). Previously described coprolites from the Upper Cretaceous of Alberta are small, unstructured, ellipsoidal forms thought to derive from a crocodilian or terrestrial, carnivorous reptile of necrophagic or piscivorous habits (Waldman, 1970; Waldman and Hopkins, 1970).


1993 ◽  
Vol 30 (10) ◽  
pp. 2255-2272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip J. Currie ◽  
Stephen J. Godfrey ◽  
Lev Nessov

New specimens of caenagnathid theropods are described from the Judith River Formation (Campanian) of southern Alberta, the Hell Creek Formation (Maastrichtian) of South Dakota, and the Bissekty Formation (Turonian) of Uzbekistan. With the exception of the Hell Creek specimen, and a vertebra from Alberta, all are from the symphysial regions of the lower jaws. Caenagnathids are rare and poorly known animals, and the described fossils preserve heretofore unknown features, including vascular grooves and foramina in the symphysial region, and the pattern of overlapping sutures between jaw elements. Most of the new specimens are different from the holotype of Caenagnathus collinsi Sternberg and may represent the second described species, Caenagnathus sternbergi. The two jaws from the Bissekty Formation are the first oviraptorosaurian jaws described from Uzbekistan and represent a new genus and species anatomically closer to Caenagnathus than to central Asian forms like Oviraptor, Conchoraptor and Ingenia. There are at least five characters that distinguish caenagnathid and oviraptorid jaws, but it is concluded that the length of the symphysial region must be used with caution. Jaw anatomy supports the idea that oviraptorids were well adapted for eating eggs, although their diet was probably not restricted to one food type.


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 272-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared T. Voris ◽  
Darla K. Zelenitsky ◽  
François Therrien ◽  
Kohei Tanaka

North America is known for its rich uppermost Cretaceous record of dinosaur egg remains, although a notable fossil gap exists during the lower Maastrichtian. Here we describe a diverse dinosaur eggshell assemblage from the St. Mary River Formation of southern Alberta that, in conjunction with recently described eggs from the same formation in Montana, helps fill this gap and sheds light on the dinosaur diversity in this poorly fossiliferous formation. Three theropod eggshell types (Continuoolithus cf. C. canadensis, Montanoolithus cf. M. strongorum, and Prismatoolithus cf. P. levis) and one ornithopod (Spheroolithus cf. S. albertensis), are reported from Albertan exposures of the St. Mary River Formation, increasing the ootaxonomic diversity of the formation from two to five ootaxa. The taxonomic composition of the eggshell assemblage is consistent with the dinosaurian fauna known from the St. Mary River Formation based on skeletal remains. Spheroolithus eggshells constitute the majority of identifiable eggshells in our assemblage, a trend also observed in several other Upper Cretaceous formations from North America. Continuoolithus is shown to be synonymous with Spongioolithus, thus expanding the Maastrichtian geographic range of the ootaxon to include Utah. The St. Mary River eggshell assemblage supports a general trend of increase in eggshell thickness among theropod ootaxa from the uppermost Santonian through the Maastrichtian, which is inferred to reflect an increase in body size among some clades of small theropods through the Upper Cretaceous. Eggshell preservation in the St. Mary River Formation may be related to the semiarid climatic and environmental conditions that prevailed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelio José Figueredo ◽  
Steven C. Hertler ◽  
Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gretchen F. Wagner ◽  
Emeline Mourocq ◽  
Michael Griesser

Biparental care systems are a valuable model to examine conflict, cooperation, and coordination between unrelated individuals, as the product of the interactions between the parents influences the fitness of both individuals. A common experimental technique for testing coordinated responses to changes in the costs of parental care is to temporarily handicap one parent, inducing a higher cost of providing care. However, dissimilarity in experimental designs of these studies has hindered interspecific comparisons of the patterns of cost distribution between parents and offspring. Here we apply a comparative experimental approach by handicapping a parent at nests of five bird species using the same experimental treatment. In some species, a decrease in care by a handicapped parent was compensated by its partner, while in others the increased costs of care were shunted to the offspring. Parental responses to an increased cost of care primarily depended on the total duration of care that offspring require. However, life history pace (i.e., adult survival and fecundity) did not influence parental decisions when faced with a higher cost of caring. Our study highlights that a greater attention to intergenerational trade-offs is warranted, particularly in species with a large burden of parental care. Moreover, we demonstrate that parental care decisions may be weighed more against physiological workload constraints than against future prospects of reproduction, supporting evidence that avian species may devote comparable amounts of energy into survival, regardless of life history strategy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-290
Author(s):  
J. Mark Erickson

AbstractIn midcontinent North America, the Fox Hills Formation (Upper Cretaceous, upper Maastrichtian) preserves the last marine faunas in the central Western Interior Seaway (WIS).Neritoptyx hogansoninew species, a small littoral snail, exhibited allometric change from smooth to corded ornament and rounded to shouldered shape during growth. Specimens preserve a zig-zag pigment pattern that changes to an axial pattern during growth.Neritoptyx hogansoninew species was preyed on by decapod crustaceans, and spent shells were occupied by pagurid crabs. Dead mollusk shells, particularly those ofCrassostrea subtrigonalis(Evans and Shumard, 1857), provided a hard substrate to which they adhered on the Fox Hills tidal flats. This new neritimorph gastropod establishes a paleogeographic and chronostratigraphic proxy for intertidal conditions on the Dakota Isthmus during the late Maastrichtian. Presence of a neritid extends the marine tropical/temperate boundary in the WIS northward to ~44° late Maastrichtian paleolatitude. Late Maastrichtian closure of the isthmus subsequently altered marine heat transfer by interrupting northward flow of tropical currents from the Gulf Coast by as much as 1 to 1.5 million years before the Cretaceous ended.UUID:http://zoobank.org/3ba56c07-fcca-4925-a2f0-df663fc3a06b


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