Abydosaurus
| Abydosaurus | ||||||||||||
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Lower Cretaceous ( Albium ) | ||||||||||||
| 112.9 to 100.5 million years | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Abydosaurus | ||||||||||||
| Chure , Britt , Whitlock , Wilson , 2010 |
Abydosaurus is a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous ( Albium ) of North America. The genus and type species A. mcintoshi was scientifically described in 2010 . The genus is named after the Egyptian city of Abydos , where the head and neck of Osiris , the ancient Egyptian god of the afterlife, rebirth, fertility and the dead are said to be buried.
The description has been made on the basis of two completely preserved skulls, a snout and a skull . Finding skulls is unusual for sauropods, as they are seldom preserved in fossil form due to their light construction . In total, only parts of the skull of a third of the sauropods have survived, and complete skulls have survived in even fewer genera. Since the little fossilized postcranial material (skeletal parts behind the skull) has not yet been prepared , it was not used for the first description.
features
All four skulls are about the same size, they are about half a meter long and about half as high. The upper jaw region ( premaxillary and maxillary ) is clearly separated from the rest of the skull. In contrast to other Sauropoden the macronaria as Camarasaurus and Brachiosaurus are at abydosaurus which, as with all Sauropoden rearwardly displaced external nasal openings smaller than the bony orbits ( orbit ) which, when abydosaurus are the largest openings skull.
In the upper and lower jaw there are 14 teeth on each side, which differ in size and shape. The teeth of the upper jaw have a D-shaped cross-section and are larger than those of the lower jaw opposite them, the cross-section of which is elliptical.
Systematics
Abydosaurus is regarded as a sister genus of Brachiosaurus within the Titanosauriformes .
literature
- Daniel Chure, Brooks B. Britt, John A. Whitlock, Jeffrey A. Wilson: First complete sauropod dinosaur skull from the Cretaceous of the Americas and the evolution of sauropod dentition. In: Natural Sciences . Vol. 97, No. 4, 2010, pp. 379-391, doi : 10.1007 / s00114-010-0650-6 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Gregory S. Paul : The Princeton Field Guide To Dinosaurs. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ et al. 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-13720-9 , p. 203, online .