US EditionTiny new dinosaur Foskeia pelendonum fills in an evolutionary gap
Foskeia pelendonum, a half-meter-long herbivorous dinosaur from northern Spain, shows mature features and reshapes understanding of European dinosaur evolution, study finds.
- On February 2, Paul-Emile Dieudonné led an international team to describe Foskeia pelendonum, a barely half-meter-long ornithopod from Vegagete, Burgos, Spain, in Papers in Palaeontology.
- By placing Foskeia pelendonum near the origin of the European Rhabdodontidae, the analysis recovers a topology that revives Phytodinosauria, reshaping herbivore lineages.
- Uncovered by Fidel Torcida Fernández‑Baldor, the fossils represent at least five individuals enabling skull reconstruction, while histological analyses supervised by Dr. Koen Stein show sexual maturity and metabolic traits approaching small mammals or birds.
- New phylogenetic results place Foskeia as sister to the Australian Muttaburrasaurus and expand the European clade Rhabdodontia; the team cautions the hypothesis needs further testing with more data.
- By filling a 70‑million‑year gap, Thierry Tortosa said Foskeia highlights miniaturization and urges focus on small, fragmentary fossils to advance ornithischian research.
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16 Articles
The remarkably small dinosaur lived in the Lower Cretaceous Period (100 million to 145 million years ago), in an area that is now northern Spain.
An international team of researchers, led by Paul-Émile Dieudonné, PhD in Vertebrate Paleontology from the National University of Río Negro (Argentina), has documented the remains of the 'Foskeia pelendonum' in the Vegagete field (Burgos), in the Sierra de la Demanda. The study has been published in the specialized magazine 'Papers in Paleontology'. It would be the smallest dinosaur ornitópod in the world that is now known, no greater than a dog…
The Archaeological and Paleontological Collective of Salas (CAS) has found in the Vegagete field, near Villanueva de Carazo (Burgos), about 800 bones, corresponding to...
The Foskeia pendonum, half a metre long, had a very wide skull in its back area and its jaw was very developed to fix a powerful chewing muscles
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