https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4002-9540
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Abstract
The Iberian fossil record of placodonts, a group of Triassic marine reptiles with specialized crushing trophic adaptations, is mostly based on scarce isolated remains and therefore poorly informative. Abundant placodont remains were found in the 1980’s in Middle Triassic levels (Ladinian, Muschelkalk Facies) of Canales de Molina (Guadalajara Province, Central Spain), but they remained unpublished. This material is described and figured here for the first time. It includes isolated teeth and armor plates, but also the first relatively complete placodont carapace found in the Iberian record. Paleohistological studies performed here on several isolated armor plates of different sizes suggest that all of them could belong to different ontogenetic stages of the same taxon, the carapace probably representing a juvenile individual of a potential new species within the genus Psephosauriscus. This is the first reference of this genus in the European record, being so far known from the Middle Triassic of the Middle East. An update considering all so far published Iberian specimens of Placodontia is performed.
Acknowledgements
All the sauropterygian material found in Canales de Molina was donated to the MGM by Francisco Alférez. We thank Silvia Menéndez, María Victoria Quiralte (MGM) and Ana Bravo (now Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid) for the access to the collection and the support provided during the course of this study, Eleuterio Baeza (MGM) for the preparation of some of these specimens, and Rainer Schoch (Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde, Stuttgart) for the access to comparative specimens. We thank the editor Gareth Dyke and the reviewers Nathalie Bardet and James Neenan for their kind comments, which have helped to improve this paper.