Niobrarasaurus
| Niobrarasaurus | ||||||||||||
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Upper Cretaceous (early to middle Campanium ) | ||||||||||||
| 83.6 to 76.4 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Niobrarasaurus | ||||||||||||
| Carpenter , Dilkes & Weishampel , 1995 | ||||||||||||
| Art | ||||||||||||
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Niobrarasaurus is a little-known genus of pelvic dinosaurs from the Ankylosauria group .
features
At an estimated 5 meters in length, Niobrarasaurus was a medium-sized ankylosaur. As with all representatives of this group, his body was covered with armor made of bone plates, the exact arrangement of which is not known. The trunk was stocky, the limbs short and strong. The skull is only preserved in fragments, but it had a pattern on its front end. Like all Ankylosauria, this dinosaur moved quadruped (on all fours) and ate plants.
Discovery and naming
The fossil remains of niobrarasaurus were in the 1930s in the Niobrara formation in the State of Kansas discovered by Virgil Cole and first under the name Hierosaurus first described . According to more recent studies in the 1990s, the animal was named Niobrarasaurus after the place where it was found. The only known species and thus type species is N. coleii . The finds are dated in the Upper Cretaceous (between early and middle Campanian ) to an age of around 83 to 76 million years.
Systematics
Due to similarities with Nodosaurus , Niobrarasaurus is sometimes included in the Ankylosauria group of the Nodosauridae . Other systematics such as M. Vickaryous (2004) see the fossils as too sparse for an exact classification and therefore list it as "Ankylosauria incertae sedis ".
literature
- Matthew K. Vickaryous, Teresa Maryańska , David B. Weishampel : Ankylosauria. 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. 363-392.
Individual evidence
- ^ Dougal Dixon : The World Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Creatures. Lorenz, London 2007, ISBN 978-0-7548-1730-7 , p. 374.