The Late Cretaceous was a time of tremendous global change, as the final stages of the Age of Dinosaurs were shaped by climate and sea level fluctuations and witness to marked paleogeographic and faunal changes, before the end-Cretaceous bolide impact. The terrestrial fossil record of Late Cretaceous Europe is becoming increasingly better understood, based largely on intensive fieldwork over the past two decades, promising new insights into latest Cretaceous faunal evolution. We review the terrestrial Late Cretaceous record from Europe and discuss its importance for understanding the paleogeography, ecology, evolution, and extinction of land-dwelling vertebrates. We review the major Late Cretaceous faunas from Austria, Hungary, France, Spain, Portugal, and Romania, as well as more fragmentary records from elsewhere in Europe. We discuss the paleogeographic background and history of assembly of these faunas, and argue that they are comprised of an endemic ‘core’ supplemented with various immigration waves. These faunas lived on an island archipelago, and we describe how this insular setting led to ecological peculiarities such as low diversity, a preponderance of primitive taxa, and marked changes in morphology (particularly body size dwarfing). We conclude by discussing the importance of the European record in understanding the end-Cretaceous extinction and show that there is no clear evidence that dinosaurs or other groups were undergoing long-term declines in Europe prior to the bolide impact.

During the Mesozoic, various groups of reptiles underwent a spectacular return to an aquatic life, colonizing most marine environments. They were highly diversified both systematically and ecologically, and most were the largest top-predators of the marine ecosystems of their time. The main groups were Ichthyosauria, Sauropterygia, Thalattosauria, and several lineages of Testudinata, Crocodyliformes, Rhynchocephalia and Squamata. Here we show that the palaeobiogeographical distribution of these marine reptiles closely followed the break-up of the supercontinent Pangaea and that they globally used the main marine corridors However, if large faunal interchanges were possible at a global scale following a dispersal model, some provinces, such as the Mediterranean Tethys, were characterized by a peculiar faunal identity, illustrating an absence of migration with time despite the apparent lack of barriers. So, if Continental Drift enabled global circulations and faunal interchanges via dispersals among Mesozoic marine reptiles, others parameters, such as ecological and biological constraints, probably also played a role in the local endemic distribution of some of these marine groups, as they do today.

A new hadrosaurid dinosaur, Arenysaurus ardevoli gen. et sp. nov., from the Late Maastrichtian of Aren (Huesca, South-central Pyrenees) is described on the basis of a partial, articulated skull, mandibular remains and postcranial elements, including vertebrae, girdle and limb bones. Arenysaurus is characterized by having a very prominent frontal dome; nearly vertical prequadratic (squamosal) and jugal (postorbital) processes, and deltopectoral crest of the humerus oriented anteriorly. Moreover, it possesses a unique combination of characters: short frontal (length/width approximately 0.5); midline ridge of parietal at level of the postorbitalsquamosal bar; parietal excluded from the occiput; squamosal low above the cotyloid cavity. A phylogenetical analysis indicates that Arenysaurus is a rather basal member of Lambeosaurinae and the sister-taxon to Amurosaurus and the Corythosaurini-

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