Dinosaur undertracks are described in the Upper Cretaceous Capacete Formation of the Sanfranciscana Basin, southeastern Brazil. These vertebrate traces are preserved in fine-grained deposits deposited in muddy and vegetated floodplain settings associated with a meandering river system active during the Campanian–Maastrichtian. Based on sedimentologic data, morphostructural analysis, and comparisons with analogous Cretaceous ichnofossils, we interpret these structures as undertracks produced by sauropods. Notably, although other occurrences of footprints and undertracks are known in younger units, no dinosaur fossils have yet been recovered in the Upper Cretaceous of the Sanfranciscana Basin. However, they are widespread in chronocorrelated units from the Bauru Basin, deposited by fluvial distributary and lacustrine systems under arid to semi-arid climatic conditions. During the Late Cretaceous, these two basins were putatively separated due to the uplift of the Alto Paranaíba High (APH) in the central part of the South American Platform. Our new sedimentologic and paleontologic data from the Sanfranciscana Basin, combined with regional paleogeography and paleoclimate reconstructions, suggest that a rain shadow effect played a key role in influencing precipitation patterns in the northern side of the APH. In this scenario of orographic rainfall, sauropod populations likely migrated from the Bauru Basin in the Southern Hot Arid Belt to the Sanfranciscana Basin in the Equatorial Humid Belt, possibly driven by droughts and shortages of food and water. This inferred migratory pathway likely involved a lowland-upland-lowland journey of dinosaur herds through the APH, eventually leading them to the humid floodplains of the Sanfranciscana Basin, where resources such as food and water were more abundant.
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