The amphibians and reptiles from the Early Pleistocene of Coste San Giacomo (Anagni Basin, Italy)

ABSTRACT

The site of Coste San Giacomo, in the Anagni Basin, is renowned for its mammal fauna of Early Pleistocene (Gelasian) age, including 32 taxa of small and large mammals. Adding to these, a small amount of remains of amphibians and reptiles was also recovered during recent excavations focused on collecting small vertebrates as well. The analysis of these remains resulted in the identification of a total of at least six different taxa: three anurans (Bufonidae indet., Pelophylax sp., and Rana sp.) and three reptiles (Lacertidae indet., Pseudopus sp., and Natrix sp.). This assemblage is comprised of taxa that are common in the Italian Quaternary, but also presents the first occurrence of the large anguid Pseudopus from the Apennine Peninsula in this period. On the whole, the herpetofauna indicates the presence of humid conditions in CSG at the moment of deposition of the bone bed that yielded the vertebrate remains.

KEYWORDS:

• Pseudopus
• herpetofauna
• Gelasian
• Quaternary
• Apennine Peninsula
• Latium

Acknowledgments

We are especially grateful to the fieldwork co-director Fabio Parenti, Luciano Bruni and to the Istituto Italiano di Paleontologia Umana (IsIPU) for their invaluable work during the CSG 2013 excavation campaign. A special thank is due to Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici del Lazio, which authorized field activities. We would like to thank Saverio Bartolini Lucenti (Firenze) for sending us pictures and comments on the Rana temporaria fossils from Equi, as well as Hugues-Alexandre Blain (Tarragona) for sharing information about the ilia of Rana pyrenaica. We further thank the editor Gareth Dyke and the reviewers, Hugues-Alexandre Blain, Georgios Georgalis and three anonymous ones. The original maps used for Figure 1 are freely available at d-maps (https://d-maps.com/index.php?lang=en). This is the publication number 351 of the Museo di Geologia e Paleontologia collections at the Università degli Studi di Torino.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Supplementary material

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Fondi di Ateneo dell’Università di Torino (2019-2020), Generalitat de Catalunya (CERCA Program), and Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación [CGL2016-76431-P, AEI/FEDER, EU].