INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE FOR SPINOSAURID SURVIVAL INTO THE LATEST CRETACEOUS: A COMMENT ON OLMEDO-ROMAÑA ET AL. (2025)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5710/AMGH.10.12.2025.3673Keywords:
Crocodylomorph, Spinosaurid, Teeth, Late Cretaceous, Taxonomy, Morphological convergenceAbstract
The recent description of putative spinosaurid teeth from the latest Cretaceous (Campanian–Maastrichtian) of Peru by Olmedo-
Romaña et al. (2025) has interesting implications for our understanding of these atypical dinosaur predators. Such a late occurrence of the clade would require a temporal range extension of some 15 million years, suggesting they survived the currently enigmatic faunal turnover events experienced during the “mid”-Cretaceous and persisted for some time beyond the Cenomanian. This commentary reviews the taxonomic affinities of these specimens. We demonstrate that their morphology is inconsistent with spinosaurid dentition and that they lack key characters exhibited by the clade, with our revised interpretation instead favouring crocodylomorph affinities for these specimens. Accordingly, we urge caution in the interpretation of conidont tooth morphologies given that multiple semi-aquatic and aquatic amniote lineages independently converged on this dental morphotype. Spinosaurids did not, therefore, survive into the latest Cretaceous and instead appear to go extinct around the Cenomanian–Turonian boundary, the drivers of which remain unclear.
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