Guanlong
| Guanlong | ||||||||||
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Artistic reconstruction of the skull |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||
| Upper Jurassic ( Oxfordium ) | ||||||||||
| 163.5 to 157.3 million years | ||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||
| Guanlong | ||||||||||
| Xu et al. , 2006 | ||||||||||
| Art | ||||||||||
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Guanlong is a fossil genus of dinosaurs , of which two very well-preserved specimens wereexcavatedin the northwest Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang in the Junggar Basin and assigned to the species Guanlong wucaii ( Hanyu Pinyin : guānlóng wŭcái). Both specimens cameto lightin rock layers from the Upper Jurassic ( Oxfordian ) and are assigned to the group of Coelurosauria . The generic name Guanlong ,given tothem by researchers at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences ,means “crowned dragon”, the epithet wucaii stands for “five” ( wu ) and “color”, with “five colors” referring to the particularly rich colored rock of the site and not to the bone finds.
The Chinese researchers assign the finds as early ancestors of Tyrannosaurus to the tyrannosauroids . Guanlong wucaii is considered a predator because of its teeth . The animal, about three meters long, had a noticeable fragile comb on its rather elongated snout . This nose jewelry was called the "crown" by the discoverers and was used for the naming. Due to its distinctive “lightweight construction” with many cavities, the “crown” cannot have been used for fighting and is therefore interpreted as a social signal in connection with the choice of sexual partners or generally with the identification of the species.
The larger of the two animals is said to have been twelve years old at the time of his death and had been fully grown for five years. In a drawing that was added to the first description of the new genus and species in the journal Nature , Guanlong wucaii was depicted with sparse plumage, but the find situation did not provide any evidence for this.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Xing Xu , James M. Clark , Catherine A. Forster, Mark A. Norell , Gregory M. Erickson, David A. Eberth, Chengkai Jia, Qi Zhao: A basal tyrannosauroid dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of China. In: Nature . Vol. 439, No. 7077, 2006, pp. 715-718, doi : 10.1038 / nature04511 .
