During an investigation in the Lourinhã region, isolated skull bones and some vertebral and post-cranial elements were collected, a set of fossils dating to 150 million years ago. This was the starting point for a new discovery.
This is a new species of amphibian from the Late Jurassic of Portugal, named Nabia civiscientrix.
The bones were collected by Alexandre Guillaume, researcher at the Faculty of Science and Technology of NOVA University Lisbon and the Lourinhã Museum, and also as part of a citizen science project carried out at the Lourinhã Dinosaur Park and at the museum.
“It’s always good to see local communities involved in this kind of project, especially when they end up giving such prominence to their own paleontological heritage,” says Miguel Moreno-Azanza, professor at the University of Zaragoza and the leading co-author of the article that reports the discovery.
Part of the work also consisted of comparing the Lourinhã fossils with others collected from the Guimarota beds, also in Portugal and of the same age, i.e., the same roughly 150 million years.
“The Guimarota material has been known for a long time,” explains Alexandre Guillaume, the first author of the study.
“We knew it was a new species, which has always been regarded as such by other paleontologists. But our previous study on the frontal part challenged the original assignment to the genus Celtedens. Therefore, we had to delve deeper into the investigation,” details the paleontologist.
From that deeper study of the bones, this new species emerged. It is the oldest Albanerpetontid on the Iberian Peninsula and one of the oldest in the world, the researchers explain.
“This new species highlights the herpetofauna present in Lourinhã during the Late Jurassic, 150 million years ago,” adds Guillaume.
Lourinhã is known for its dinosaurs, such as Lourinhanosaurus, Hesperonyx or Miragaia, which coexisted with other smaller animals that crawled between their large legs.
Among them are the enigmatic Albanerpetontidae: a group of extinct lissamphibians (which includes modern amphibians) that looked like small salamanders, less than five centimeters in length. They captured their prey with projectile-like tongues like chameleons, had dry and scaly skin, unlike modern salamanders, claws made of something similar to keratin, and they had eyelids.
Several of the Lourinhã specimens that are among the best preserved were sent to England to be analyzed with micro-computed tomography. This enabled the creation of three-dimensional models of the bones, which the researchers used to illustrate and describe the bones in detail, allowing, they say, a complete review of the anatomy of Albanerpetontidae.
“Until recently, studies generally focused on a limited set of easily recognizable bones, because for a long time we did not have complete or articulated specimens, and several bones were not illustrated and, therefore, were not identified,” laments Alexandre Guillaume.
Thus, some species could be described based on only a few bones, but then could not be compared with more complete specimens in which these bones would be missing or poorly preserved.
However, based on the observations of Alexandre Guillaume and Susan Evans from the new material and other specimens worldwide, the researchers proposed a new set of morphological data for future analyses, implementing new features and updating the previous ones, which constitutes one of the main results of this work.
“I invite everyone to look more closely at these small bones, often overlooked, so that we can better understand, together, what these small amphibians were. This is only the first step,” concludes Alexandre Guillaume.
