The first record of dinosaur tracks from the Cretaceous Zhagang Group of the northwestern Guangdong Province, China

ABSTRACT

The Jurassic and Cretaceous tetrapod track record in China has incrementally expanded due to the discovery of small sites in widely dispersed geographical locations, which often lack body fossils. Many of these are theropod dominated tracksites where, despite morphological variation, identification of ichnotaxa is difficult at low taxonomic levels (i.e., ichnogenus/ichnospecies assignments). Here we report on an Early to mid-Cretaceous site from the Mawu Formation (Zhagang Group) in Guangdong Province, China, a region thus far scarcely known from dinosaur fossils. The new site yielded three different morphotypes tentatively labelled as a Paracorpulentapus-eubrontid-grallatorid assemblage. It is noted that similar assemblages have been identified from Cretaceous deposits in Sichuan and Anhui provinces of China.

KEYWORDS:

• Theropod tracks
• Paracorpulentapus
• eubrontid
• grallatorid

Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [41888101, 41790455, 41772008], the 111 project [B20011] and the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities [265QZ201903].