Ben Creisler
New papers about fossil vertebrates from Scotland:
The Kilmaluag Formation on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, provides one of the richest Mesozoic vertebrate fossil assemblages in the UK, and is among the richest globally for Middle Jurassic tetrapods. Since its discovery in 1971, this assemblage has predominantly yielded small-bodied tetrapods, including salamanders, choristoderes, lepidosaurs, turtles, crocodylomorphs, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, non-mammalian cynodonts and mammals, alongside abundant fish and invertebrates. It is protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and by Nature Conservancy Order. Unlike contemporaneous localities from England, this assemblage yields associated partial skeletons, providing unprecedented new data. We present a comprehensive updated overview of the Kilmaluag Formation, including its geology and the fossil collections made to date, with evidence of several species occurrences presented here for the first time. We place the vertebrate faunal assemblage in an international context through comparisons with relevant contemporaneous localities from the UK, Europe, Africa, Asia and the US. This wealth of material reveals the Kilmaluag Formation as a vertebrate fossil assemblage of global significance, both in terms of understanding Middle Jurassic faunal composition and the completeness of specimens, with implications for the early evolutionary histories of mammals, squamates and amphibians.
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The well-known late Mississippian/early Carboniferous locality of East Kirkton in Scotland has the earliest described fauna of terrestrial tetrapods. Seven species are now known, represented by articulated skeletons of moderate-sized animals with snout-vent length of up to 200mm, and each is unique to East Kirkton. Here we describe the skull bones of a much larger tetrapod that closely resembles those of embolomeres from the Pennsylvanian. Although the new material is too incomplete to be named as a new species, it enhances the taxonomic diversity of the East Kirkton tetrapod fauna, predates the embolomeres from other sites in Scotland and extends the range of the group earlier into the Mississippian.
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