Amazing specimen nicely preserved, still fully rooted. Quite unusual feature.
The pterosaurs dentition rests in the Upper Cretaceous in North Africa are relatively common among the fauna which got preserved from those ecosystems around 100 million years ago. However, only two different pterosaur taxons have been described. Mader & Kellner (1999) (Full reference: B. J. Mader and A. W. A. Kellner. 1999. A new anhanguerid pterosaur from the Cretaceous of Morocco. Boletim do Museu Nacional - Geologia 45:1-11) described the Coloborhynchus moroccensis species, belonging to the Anhangueridae family, which lived at the middle of the Cretaceous (between the Albian and Cenomanian stages, about 105 million years ago). Remains have been discovered in Morocco. Another alternative combination in the nomenclature of this taxon is Siroccopteryx moroccensis.
Phylogeny: The descriptors of Siroccopteryx placed this genus in the family Anhangueridae, sensu Kellner. David Unwin, however, indicated in 2001 that it was a species of Coloborhynchus, then he called it as C. moroccensis and being a member of the Ornithocheiridae. This has been controversial. In the same year, Michael Festnacht suggested it was more similar to Anhanguera due to the wide end of the snout. In 2009, Kellner considered that Siroccopteryx, Coloborhynchus clavirostris and Uktenadactylus probably formed together a clade within Anhangueridae. [This last paragraph is from Wikipedia - License: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported]
The type specimen is: LINHM 016, a partial skull (Anterior part of upper jaw with teeth). Its type locality is Beg'aa, west of Hamada du Guir, which is in a Cenomanian fluvial sandstone in the Kem Kem Formation of Morocco.
For more rigorous scientific information, see also Martill and Unwin 2011, Rodrigues and Kellner 2008, Unwin 2001 and Unwin 2003.
Despite the amount of teeth of this genus than have been discovered, there is still a lot to be discovered about the paleoecology of this flying piscivorous.
On the other hand, recently Ibreahim et al., 2010, described a new genus and species of pterosaur, belonging to the Azhdarchidae family, and found in the same fossiliferous locations of the Moroccan Cretaceous. This new species was named Alanqa saharahica. (Full reference: N. Ibrahim, D. M. Unwin, D. M. Martill, L. Baidder, and S. Zouhri. 2010. A new pterosaur (Pterodactyloidea: Azharchidae) from the Upper Cretaceous of Morocco. PLoS One 5(5):e10875)
The different Geological Formations that make up the orography of the Cretaceous in the South East of Morocco have been mostly treated in an undifferentiated and not too accurate way by collectors, by Paleontology aficionados and by fossil dealers.
Historically, fossils dealers from all around the world have identified the dinosaur pieces from this sector as belonging to the Tegana Formation. However, in a formal way, most of the last published studies refer to other nomenclature in the description of the units and formations of the Lower and Upper Cretaceous.
That's why next we include an interesting link where the Aoufous Formation and the Ifezouane Formation are described, making reference to their age, geological history, sedimentology, stratigraphy and vertebrate assemblage. It includes a brief explanation of the stratigraphic concepts that have been established formally until today in the studies of this sector of Morocco.
This way, the precise stratigraphic understanding of the origin of the rests, as well as the sedimentological analysis, enables a better paleoecologic characterization of the environments where this amazing dinosaur assemblage lived.
Link: Aoufous Formation
