Dravidosaurus
| Dravidosaurus | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Upper Cretaceous (possibly Coniacium ) | ||||||||||||
| 89.7 to 86.3 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Dravidosaurus | ||||||||||||
| Yadagiri & Ayyasami , 1979 | ||||||||||||
| Art | ||||||||||||
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Dravidosaurus is a controversial genus of the bird's pelvis dinosaur from the group of stegosauria . It is the geologically youngest stegosaur, but the underlying fossil remains are interpreted by Chatterjee and Rudma (1996) and Chatterjee (1997) as that of a plesiosaur . Dravidosaurus wasdiscoveredin southern India (state of Tamil Nadu )in the 1970sand named after the Dravidian peoplesliving there.
features
Dravidosaurus was a small stegosaur of which only parts of the skull and the body skeleton are known. The head was relatively small and was characterized by the fact that the eye socket was surrounded by two supraorbital bones. There are also some bone plates typical of Stegosauria known, these were large and triangular. Tail spines, another characteristic of stegosaurs, were also present; these were characterized by the noticeably elongated middle section.
Dating and systematics
The finds of Dravidosaurus are dated to the Upper Cretaceous ( Coniacium ) at an age of 89 to 86 million years. It is the geologically youngest known stegosaur - otherwise known only up to the Lower Cretaceous - and the first to be found in India. It is conceivable that the stegosaurs in the geographical isolation of India during the Cretaceous Period (the subcontinent was an island at the time) could have survived longer than anywhere else.
However, the findings are very poorly transmitted, and some researchers such as Sankar Chatterjee consider the animal to be a representative of the plesiosaurs . Peter Galton and Paul Upchurch assume, however, that it is a stegosaur, but believe further investigations are necessary.
literature
- Peter M. Galton , Paul Upchurch : Stegosauria. In: David B. Weishampel , Peter Dodson , Halszka Osmólska (eds.): The Dinosauria . 2nd edition. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 2004, ISBN 0-520-24209-2 , pp. 343-362.
- David E. Fastovsky , David B. Weishampel: The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2005, ISBN 0-521-81172-4 .
- Sankar Chatterjee , Dhiraj K. Rudra: KT events in India: impact, rifting, volcanism and dinosaur extinction. In: Proceedings of the Gondwanan Dinosaur Symposium. Brisbane, December 20, 1996 (= Memoirs of the Queensland Museum. Vol. 39, No. 3, ISSN 0079-8835 ). Queensland Museum, Brisbane 1996, pp. 489-532, digitized .