The Las Hoyas Lagerstätte: a palaeontological view of an Early Cretaceous wetland

Abstract

Las Hoyas (Cuenca, Spain) represents a unique Lower Cretaceous (Barremian) fossil biota of a wetland. The site has yielded a particularly diverse assemblage of more than twenty thousand plant and animal fossils, many of which present unprecedented soft-tissue preservation, including microstructural details. Among the most significant discoveries are the oldest angiosperms, the smallest species of chondrichtians and squamates, new theropod dinosaurs, including several enantiornithine birds, the first European tapejarid pterosaur and the most complete Eutriconodont mammal. Such discoveries have produced data on important aspects related to plant and animal evolution, such as the first steps in flower development by plants, insight on unknown anatomical and diet specializations in theropod dinosaurs, the development of flight maneuverability in early birds, the unexpected global distribution of tapejarid dinosaurs, and groundbreaking data on early mammalian hair development. There are many more discoveries to unveil and new research is now liking the immense wealth of paleobiological information with mathematical procedures to study the ecological structure of the wetland. Supplementary material: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6336914

A new enantiornithine specimen from the Lower Cretaceous of Las Hoyas: avifaunal diversity and life-history of a wetland Mesozoic bird

“…The Early Cretaceous site of Las Hoyas (Cuenca, Spain, upper Barremian, 126-129 My, Diéguez et al, 1995;Vicente & Martín-Closas, 2013) contains the most diverse and best-preserved avifauna of the Mesozoic of Europe, including the second oldest enantiornithine assemblage worldwide (Sanz et al, 2016;Benito & Olivé 2022). More than 30 years of palaeontological excavations at Las Hoyas resulted in the discovery of multiple avian skeletal remains and numerous isolated feathers (Sanz et al, 2016;Marugán-Lobón & Vullo, 2016;Knoll et al, 2018;Kaye et al, 2019). At this site, birds represent the third most abundant group of amniotes, surpassed only by crocodylomorphs and squamates .…”