MEANING: From clay and water
PERIOD: Late Cretaceous
CONTINENT: South America
Caletodraco is an abelisaurid theropod dinosaur from Late Cretaceous of what is now France. It was a fairly large bipedal carnivore at around 6 m in length. Abelisaurs are known for having shortened snouts with small teeth, and very small arms. Abelisaurs are mainly known from the southern hemisphere, especially South America. The discovery of Caletodraco in Europe reveals that their dispersal may have been more universal than previously thought.
Abstract from paper: An articulated group of skeletal elements comprising a sacrum, both ilia and a first caudal vertebra, plus an isolated tooth found in immediate proximity to the bones, from the lower Cenomanian Chalk at Saint-Jouin-Bruneval (Seine-Maritime, Normandy, France) is described and attributed to a new genus and species of abelisaurid theropod, Caletodraco cottardi, on the basis of several characters of the sacrum and pelvis. The peculiar shape of the transverse process of the first caudal vertebra shows that Caletodraco cottardi differs from majungasaurine abelisaurids previously described from Europe, such as Arcovenator escotae, and belongs to the Furileusauria, a group of derived abelisaurids hitherto recognized only from South America. The presence of a furileusaurian abelisaurid in the Cenomanian of Normandy suggests that the biogeographical history of the Abelisauridae in Europe was more complex than hitherto admitted. Several previously described European abelisaurids, such as the Albian Genusaurus sisteronis, may in fact belong to the Furileusauria.
Caletodraco is from the Cretaceous. The Cretaceous is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago. It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of the entire Phanerozoic. The name is derived from the Latin creta, "chalk", which is abundant in the latter half of the period.
The Cretaceous was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high eustatic sea levels that created numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct flora and fauna, while dinosaurs continued to dominate on land. The world was ice free, and forests extended to the poles. During this time, new groups of mammals and birds appeared. During the Early Cretaceous, flowering plants appeared and began to rapidly diversify, becoming the dominant group of plants across the Earth by the end of the Cretaceous, coincident with the decline and extinction of previously widespread gymnosperm groups.
The Cretaceous (along with the Mesozoic) ended with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a large mass extinction in which many groups, including non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles, died out. The end of the Cretaceous is defined by the abrupt Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary), a geologic signature associated with the mass extinction that lies between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras.
Caletodraco is an abelisaur. Abelisauridae is a family of mostly large-bodied theropod dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period, on the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana. Today their fossil remains are found on the modern continents of Africa and South America, as well as on the Indian subcontinent and the island of Madagascar.
Like most theropods, abelisaurids were carnivorous bipeds. They had short robust snouts, and highly ornamented skulls with bumps, horns, grooves and pits. Their legs were stocky, and in many abelisaurids, the arms are so small as to seem vestigial. Most of the known abelisaurids were between 5 and 9 m in length.