Journal
EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH
Volume 111, Issue 3, Pages 135-156Publisher
CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1017/S1755691020000055
Keywords
Great Estuarine Group; mammaliaforms; palaeontology; salamanders; squamates; tetrapods
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Funding
- Natural Environment Research Council part of a Leverhulme Trust [NE/L002558/1]
- Palaeontographical Society
- Inverness Field Club
- National Geographic Society [7583-04, GEFNE185-16]
- National Museums of Scotland
- John Fell Fund of Oxford University
- Leverhulme Trust [RPG-2018-381]
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The Kilmaluag Formation on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, provides one of the richest Mesozoic vertebrate fossil assemblages in the UK, and is among the richest globally for Middle Jurassic tetrapods. Since its discovery in 1971, this assemblage has predominantly yielded small-bodied tetrapods, including salamanders, choristoderes, lepidosaurs, turtles, crocodylomorphs, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, non-mammalian cynodonts and mammals, alongside abundant fish and invertebrates. It is protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and by Nature Conservancy Order. Unlike contemporaneous localities from England, this assemblage yields associated partial skeletons, providing unprecedented new data. We present a comprehensive updated overview of the Kilmaluag Formation, including its geology and the fossil collections made to date, with evidence of several species occurrences presented here for the first time. We place the vertebrate faunal assemblage in an international context through comparisons with relevant contemporaneous localities from the UK, Europe, Africa, Asia and the US. This wealth of material reveals the Kilmaluag Formation as a vertebrate fossil assemblage of global significance, both in terms of understanding Middle Jurassic faunal composition and the completeness of specimens, with implications for the early evolutionary histories of mammals, squamates and amphibians.
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