ARCOVENATOR

Arcovenator has a more exciting tale to tell than most. It was dug up with what paleontologists believe to be a Neolithic-age human skeleton near the city commune of Aix-en-Provence during the widening of the A8 motorway between Châteauneuf-le-Rouge and Saint Maximin. Sadly, that doesn't prove the co-existance of man and dinosaur because there was some 75 million years-worth of muck between them. But Arcosaurus did succeed where the fragmentary Tarascosaurus had so miserably failed; by proving without doubt that abelisaurids inhabited what is now France—which belonged to a European archipelago—during the Late Cretaceous.

Like many abelisaurid theropods, the skull of Arcosaurus is highly ornamented and somewhat dome-topped, but it is also very well-preserved, which is unusual for European members of the group. On the dinosaur family tree it appears to be closest to Majungasaurus—a fellow abelisaurid from Madagascar whose impressively-domed skull tricked palaeontologists into thinking it was a "head-banging" pachycephalosaur which they named Majungatholus. In fact, the pair are so similar in features that Thierry Tortosa and co-authors raised a new abelisaurid sub-family—Majungasaurinae—to house them in 2013, and threw in Indosaurus, Rahiolisaurus and Rajasaurus which are all from India.