New material of Carinodens (Squamata, Mosasauridae) from the Maastrichtian (Late Cretaceous) phosphates of Morocco

Abstract

The genus Carinodens is an unusual, small-sized, latest Cretaceous mosasaurid. It is known only from a partially toothed dentary and a dentary fragment from the Upper Maastrichtian of The Netherlands and some thirty-odd isolated teeth from coeval stratigraphic levels from Belgium, The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia, Brazil, Morocco and Jordan. The Moroccan record is based on a single tooth crown (now lost) described by Arambourg (1952), and isolated tooth crowns newly collected from the Oulad Abdoun and Ganntour phosphatic basins. These crowns, which are typically low, swollen, laterally compressed and bicarinate, with a large apical nubbin, are referred to C. belgicus (Woodward, 1891). Except for the original specimen described by Woodward (1891), which is supposed to come from the lower Maastrichtian of Ciply (Mons Basin, Belgium) (see Jagt, 2005 for a discussion), the remainder of the Carinodens material known to date, including the new specimens from Morocco, is of late Maastrichtian age. Carinodens is known mainly from the northern margin of the Mediterranean Tethys, around palaeolatitude 40°N. However, the Brazilian, Jordanian and Moroccan records show that the range of this species also extends to lower palaeolatitudes.