Search

The Lower Cretaceous Pietraroia Plattenkalk is a fossiliferous, fine-grained cherty limestone from the Matese Mountains – Southern Apennines, Italy. The deposits are well known for the exceptional state of vertebrate fossil preservation. First considered as shallow lagoonal deposits or as intra-platform basin-fill, the Pietraroia Plattenkalk sequences are here interpreted as abandon deposits of a submarine channel (Pietraroia Channel) documenting a major transgressive event. Transgression was associated with the development of suboxic to anoxic conditions at the seafloor which favoured the preservation of fossils, as well as the deposition of coprolith-rich and bituminous layers. A peculiar paleogeographic and paleotopographic setting, which was strongly controlled by local tectonic, experienced the contiguity of wide emerged areas with a relatively deep-water channelised area where fossiliferous Plattenkalk sequences were deposited.

The Lower Cretaceous Pietraroia Plattenkalk (Benevento Province, southern Italy) has been known since the eighteenth century for its beautifully preserved fossil fishes. During Albian time (about 113 Myr ago1), deposition of fine marly limestone in a shallow lagoonal environment, affected by cyclic periods of low oxygen levels2, led to exceptional preservation of soft tissue in a juvenile theropod. The specimen, diagnosed here as Scipionyx samniticus gen. et sp. nov., is the first dinosaur ever to be found in Italy. The fossil has been mentioned previously in two brief notes3,4 and generally examined in a doctoral thesis5. Here we report the full preparation of the specimen which shows details of soft anatomy never seen previously in any dinosaur. The preservation is better than in other lagerstatten (conservative deposits)6 where theropod soft tissue has been reported, such as the Santana Formation of Brazil7 and the Yixian Formation of China8. Despite this, there is no evidence of feathers or any other integumentary remnants in the Italian specimen. Scipionyx represents a new maniraptoriform theropod. Its discovery is remarkable considering also the scarcity of juvenile theropod dinosaurs in the fossil record.

This chapter presents an overview of evidence of predator-prey relationships in pterosaurs, with a focus on the Cretaceous (Santana Formation) pterosaurs from Chapado do Araripe, northeastern Brazil. The examples from the fossil record of pterosaurs as prey is scanty; the situation of pterosaurs as predators is not much better. However, especially for pterosaurs as predator, secondary evidence provides much insight in the life of these extinct predators. Here, we present a simple geometric model that proves the suggested way of predations of the toothed and crested taxa of the Anhangueridae.