Thyreophora
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Live reconstruction of Stegosaurus |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Lower Jurassic to Upper Cretaceous ( Hettangian to Maastrichtian ) | ||||||||||||
| 201.3 to 66 million years | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Thyreophora | ||||||||||||
| Nopcsa , 1915 |
The Thyreophora ( Gr. "Shield bearer") are a taxon of the dinosaurs from the group of bird pelvic dinosaurs (Ornithischia). In addition to some basic representatives, they include the stegosauria and the ankylosauria .
Thyreophora are characterized by the bone scales. The basal representatives have small scales running in longitudinal rows; with the stegosaurs a double row of plates or spines developed along the back and the tail and with the ankylosaurs an "armor" made of bone plates was formed.
They were rather heavily built animals, except for the basal forms they were quadruped ( walking on all fours). All animals were herbivores.
Thyreophora lived from the Lower Jura to the Upper Cretaceous . The basal representatives only occurred in the Lower Jura, the stegosauria had their heyday in the Upper Jura, but died out in the Cretaceous period. The ankylosaurs peaked in the Upper Cretaceous before disappearing in the mass extinction at the end of this period.
The name was proposed in 1915 by the Hungarian paleontologist Franz Baron von Nopcsa for an originally much larger group of dinosaurs and has been used in taxonomy in the modern sense since the mid-1980s.
Systematics
The Thyreophora are composed of some basic representatives ( Scutellosaurus , Emausaurus and Scelidosaurus ) and the Eurypoda ( Stegosauria and Ankylosauria ).
The genera Bienosaurus and Tatisaurus are considered Thyreopora incertae sedis , which means that the finds are too sparse for a precise systematic classification.
A possible cladogram of Thyreophora looks like this:
| Thyreophora |
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literature
- 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 .
- 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 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Gregory S. Paul : The Princeton Field Guide To Dinosaurs. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ et al. 2010, pp. 215-239, ISBN 978-0-691-13720-9 , online .