A theropod trackway providing evidence of a pathological foot from the exceptional locality of Las Hoyas (upper Barremian, Serrania de Cuenca, Spain)
Entity
UAM. Departamento de BiologíaPublisher
Public Library of ScienceDate
2022-04-06Citation
10.1371/journal.pone.0264406
PLoS ONE 17.4 (2022): e0264406
ISSN
1932-6203DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0264406Project
Gobierno de España. PID-2019-105546GB-I00Editor's Version
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0264406Subjects
Biología y Biomedicina / BiologíaRights
© 2022 Herrera-Castillo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedAbstract
We describe a trackway (LH-Mg-10-16) occurring in laminated carbonated limestones of the
Las Hoyas locality, Serranı´a de Cuenca, Spain. It is unmistakably a large theropod dinosaur
trackway encompassing two unusual aspects, namely, wide-steps, and a set of equally
deformed left footprints (with a dislocated digit). The layer also preserves other vertebrate
trails (fish Undichna) and different impressions in the sediment. To address these complex
settings, we devised a multidisciplinary approach, including the ichnological and taphonomical descriptions, characterisation of the rock lithofacies using thin-sections, 3D structuredlight digitalisation with a high precision of 200–400 μm, and a geometric morphometric comparison with a large sample of bipedal dinosaur trackways. Sedimentary analyses showed
that the trackway was produced in a humid, benthonic microbial mat, the consistency and
plasticity of which enabled the preservation of the details of the movement of the animal.
The results of the geometric analysis indicate that the “wide-steps” of the trackway is not
unusual compared to other trackways, providing evidence that it was made by a single individual with an estimated hip height approximately 2 m. Analogous pathologies in extant
archosaurs that yield the combination of wide steps and deformed digits in the same trackway were considered. All results mutually support the hypothesis that a large theropod dinosaur, with a pathological foot, generated the trackway as it crossed an area of shallow water
while slowly walking towards the main water source, thus stepping steadily over the benthonic mat over which multiple fish were swimming
Files in this item
Google Scholar:Herrera-Castillo, Carlos M.
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Moratalla García, José Joaquín
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Belaústegui, Zaín
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Marugán Lobón, Jesús Carlos
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Martín Abad, Hugo Javier
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Martínez Nebreda, Sergio
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López Archilla, Ana Isabel
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Delgado Buscalioni, Ángela
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