Two small upper jaws pulled from Morocco’s phosphate mines reveal a new duck-billed dinosaur, Taleta taleta, that lived about 66 million years ago. The find is formally described in a peer-reviewed paper.
Taleta joins a short list of late surviving plant eaters in North Africa near the end of the dinosaur era. The discovery points to busy evolution in a corner of the world far from the famous North American sites.
What the fossils show
The work was led by Nicholas R. Longrich, Senior Lecturer in evolutionary biology at the University of Bath. His research focuses on dinosaur evolution, extinction, and how species move between continents.
The preserved bones are maxilla, the upper jaw bone that anchors the teeth, from the right and left sides. Their tooth rows and ridges differ from nearby species, hinting at a different bite and diet.
Taleta is part of the lambeosaurine, a duckbill subgroup with hollow head crests, branch of the duckbill family. Although crests are not preserved here, the jaw details place the animal within that group.
The fossils come from the uppermost beds of Morocco’s Oulad Abdoun phosphates. Those rocks span the end of the Cretaceous into the early Eocene, as shown by independent research.
A cluster of duckbills at the finish line
A prior discovery from the same region, Ajnabia odysseus, showed that duckbills reached Africa late in the Cretaceous.
“We report new fossils from the upper Maastrichtian phosphates of Morocco, showing that lambeosaurine hadrosaurids such as Ajnabia odysseus reached North Africa and achieved high diversity as the first Gondwanan members of a group once thought confined to Laurasia,” wrote Nicholas R. Longrich, Senior Lecturer in evolutionary biology at the University of Bath, in the original article.
A second species, Minqaria bata, pushed the count higher and showed that small duckbills were not alone.
Taleta belongs to Arenysaurini, a European lineage of lambeosaurines defined by shared skull and tooth traits. Finding three related species side by side in Morocco tightens the link to southern Europe.
Together, their different jaw designs suggest an adaptive radiation, rapid diversification as species split to use different foods. Subtle dental features often map to what a herbivore could crop, crush, or strip.
How Taleta reached Africa
Near the end of the Cretaceous, global seas rose and flooded lowlands. Scientists call this eustatic sea level, the average height of the global ocean through time.
Northwest Africa sat beside a broad Atlantic embayment with scattered islands and shallow shelves. That geography would have challenged dinosaurs, yet over time short overwater crossings can add up, as summarized in a broad review.
Dispersal from Iberia into North Africa fits the family tree built from the Moroccan duckbills. Once a few pioneers arrived, isolation and varied coastal habitats could have split populations quickly.
Biologists study these patterns as biogeography, the science of where species live and why. The Moroccan record adds data from a region that long had fewer dinosaur fossils than Europe and North America.
Life at the phosphate shores
The Oulad Abdoun deposits formed in shallow seas that trapped bones from land and ocean life together. That mix includes abundant sharks, bony fishes, and marine reptiles such as mosasaurs.
This surf zone setting helps explain why dinosaur bones there are often partial and scattered. Scientists call that preservational filter taphonomy, the steps that turn remains into fossils.
The timing before extinction
Taleta lived at the very end of the Cretaceous, in the Maastrichtian, the last stage before the asteroid impact that ended the dinosaur age.
That timing makes its presence especially intriguing because most lambeosaurines elsewhere had already declined.
Its survival hints that isolated regions like North Africa may have served as refuges where some lineages endured slightly longer than in North America or Asia.
Fossil ages from the Moroccan beds match layers only a few hundred thousand years older than the impact boundary. This puts Taleta and its relatives among the last known duckbills on Earth, coexisting with rapidly changing ecosystems and shrinking coastlines.
Their persistence shows how even in a collapsing world, evolution continued to experiment with new forms right up to the final moments.
Lessons from Taleta
Taleta shows that evolution near the end of the Cretaceous was local and uneven. While some regions saw fewer lambeosaurines, others, like Morocco, hosted several closely related species.
The lesson is simple and humbling. Each new fossil can sharpen or overturn tidy stories, so ideas about global trends should always be tested against fresh evidence from places long off the map.
The study is published in Gondwana Research.
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