An island of dwarfs — Reconstructing the Late Cretaceous Haţeg palaeoecosystem

The Cretaceous was a special time in the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems, and yet the record from Europe in particular is patchy. This special issue brings together results of multidisciplinary investigations on the Late Cretaceous Haţeg area in southwestern Romania, and its continental fossil assemblage, with the aim of exploring an exceptional palaeoecosystem from the European Late Cretaceous. The Haţeg dinosaurs, which seem unusually small, have become especially well known as some of the few latest Cretaceous dinosaurs from Europe, comparable with faunas from the south of France and Spain, and preserved at a time when most of Europe was under the Chalk Seas. Eastern Europe then, at a time of exceptionally high sea level, was an archipelago of islands, some of them inhabited, but none so extraordinary as Haţeg. If Haţeg truly was an island (and this is debated), the apparently small dinosaurs might well be dwarfs, as enunciated over 100 years ago by the colourful Baron Franz Nopcsa, discoverer of the faunas. The dwarfing of dinosaurs, and other taxa, is explored in this volume. The Haţeg dinosaurs appear to be very latest Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) in age, and they provide unique evidence, at a time when there are few dinosaurs known from Europe, about some of the last faunas before the KT mass extinction. Further, the flora and fauna (ostracods, fishes, frogs, turtles, lizards, crocodilians, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and mammals) have never been reviewed comprehensively, and we provide here the current best evidence of what was there, and how the taxa fit in a global context.