Cretaceous Echinoids of Mexico

This chapter offers an up to date list of Upper Cretaceous Mexican fossil echinoids. There are 149 known Cretaceous echinoids from 16 states of Mexico including: Baja California Sur, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Michoacán, Nuevo León, Oaxaca, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala and Colima. Up until the first half of the XIX century reports on the fossil echinoids of Mexico were only vaguely mentioned within geological papers. After the XIX century date specific paleontological work on echinoids began to frequently appear. Recently, diverse paleontological studies are in progress, in the State of Chiapas which has generated a local list of nine species registered for the fist time in Mexico belonging to the following genera: Orthopsis sp., Salenia sp., Goniopigus sp., Neotlingaster sp., Gompechinus sp., Lanieria sp., Petalobrissus sp., Gitolampas, sp., and Heteraster sp. These species show great affinities with Caribbean, European and Asiatic faunas.In Mexico there are two principal problems referring to the study of fossil echinoids: one is the lack of investigations focused on biogeographic, evolution and paleobiological aspects; and the second is the lack of a taxonomic revision of echinoid species reported in the literature.