The Cretaceous Dinosaur Record from Normandy (NW France): A Review

The Cretaceous dinosaur record from Normandy, in NW France, is reviewed. It includes several enigmatic specimens that were briefly mentioned in short notes published during the 19th and 20th centuries that have since then been destroyed in World War II or lost. Since they were neither described in detail nor illustrated, their identification must remain uncertain, but some may have been ankylosaur remains, while another specimen may have belonged to a bird or a non-avian theropod. Specimens that were properly described and are kept in museums in Normandy come from Albian and Cenomanian horizons in the coastal cliffs of Seine-Maritime. The Albian record, from Cape La Hève (Le Havre) includes an incomplete titanosaurian sauropod skeleton, described as Normanniasaurus genceyi, and an isolated caudal vertebra from the same provenance, probably belonging to that taxon. The Cenomanian record is limited to a group of bones and a tooth of the furileusaurian abelisaurid theropod Caletodraco cottardi from the glauconitic Chalk at Saint-Jouin-Bruneval. All these specimens come from marine sediments and are in all likelihood derived from floating carcasses that drifted over a fairly long distance from an emergent land area corresponding to the Armorican massif in the west. Although scanty, the record from Normandy sheds some light on the poorly known dinosaurs that inhabited north-western Europe during the middle part of the Cretaceous, some of which apparently had Gondwanan affinities.