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Diversity
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Reptilian Response to Major Environmental Transitions: From Deep Time to...
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Reptilian Response to Major Environmental Transitions: From Deep Time to the Anthropocene

A special issue of Diversity (ISSN 1424-2818). This special issue belongs to the section "Phylogeny and Evolution".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2026 | Viewed by 4407

Editor

Dr. Adán Pérez-García

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Grupo de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Avda. Esparta s/n, 28232 Madrid, Spain
Interests: mesozoic; reptiles; turtles
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue, entitled “Reptilian Response to Major Environmental Transitions: From Deep Time to the Anthropocene”, provides an evolutionary and ecological overview of how reptiles have navigated Earth’s most drastic shifts over millions of years. From climatic crises of the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic to the current biodiversity emergency, this taxonomic group has demonstrated extraordinary resilience and biological plasticity.

Through a collection of research articles, we explore the physiological, morphological, and behavioral mechanisms that allowed ancient lineages to survive mass extinctions and profound geological transitions. However, the focus is not limited to the past. This work connects deep-time lessons with the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene. We analyze how accelerated climate change, habitat fragmentation, and human intervention are testing the limits of the adaptive capacity of the extant representatives of this peculiar lineage.

This volume aims not only to document the evolutionary success of these animals but also to provide rigorous scientific information for current conservation strategies. By understanding how they responded to past environmental transitions, we can better predict their fate in a world transformed by our species, highlighting the urgency of protecting this living legacy of vertebrate evolution.

Dr. Adán Pérez-García
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Diversity is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2100 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • reptile evolution
  • environmental transitions
  • mass extinction
  • Anthropocene
  • conservation paleobiology

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 11861 KB  
Article
A Giant Halisaurine from the Late Maastrichtian of Morocco
by Nicholas R. Longrich and Nour-Eddine Jalil
Diversity 2026, 18(3), 159; https://doi.org/10.3390/d18030159 - 5 Mar 2026
Viewed by 4089
Abstract
The Late Cretaceous deposits of Morocco have yielded one of the richest and most diverse assemblages of marine reptiles in the world, with the mosasaurids representing the dominant group. Among the most common mosasaurs are members of the subfamily Halisaurinae. Halisaurines ranged in [...] Read more.
The Late Cretaceous deposits of Morocco have yielded one of the richest and most diverse assemblages of marine reptiles in the world, with the mosasaurids representing the dominant group. Among the most common mosasaurs are members of the subfamily Halisaurinae. Halisaurines ranged in size from the relatively small Halisaurus, which reached 4–5 m in length, to the larger Pluridens serpentis, which may have reached 7.5 m in length. Here we report a new, giant species of Pluridens, Pluridens imelaki. The new Pluridens is characterized by a slender, rectangular snout, a T-shaped premaxilla–maxilla junction, interlocking premaxilla–maxilla joint, a prominent dorsal ridge on the premaxilla, an exceptionally long and slender mandible, a tooth count of ~25 dentary teeth, straight, triangular tooth crowns that are strongly bent back just above the tooth–root junction, a low coronoid process and a tall and slender retroarticular process. The skull is 1.25 m long, suggesting a body length of ~9 m or more, comparable in size to large predators such as Thalassotitan. Differences between P. imaleki and P. serpentis in the jaw and tooth structure, eye size and innervation of the rostrum, as well as overall size, suggest they had different foraging strategies and occupied distinct ecological niches. Pluridens imelaki reveals that Halisaurinae were not only more species-rich than previously recognized, but also exhibited greater diversity in tooth morphology, jaw shape, and body size than previously thought. Rather than simply being outcompeted by Mosasaurinae, the Halisaurinae staged a minor adaptive radiation in the Late Cretaceous and were important members of the ecosystem in low latitudes. Pluridens imelaki appears to have been exceptionally rare in the phosphates, being documented by only a single specimen among the many hundreds of mosasaur remains recovered over many years. This underscores how the species richness of the phosphates and other diverse assemblages is driven by rare taxa that are only revealed through extensive sampling. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reptilian Response to Major Environmental Transitions: From Deep Time to the Anthropocene)
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