Tuojiangosaurus
| Tuojiangosaurus | ||||||||||||
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Skeleton of Tuojiangosaurus |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Upper Jurassic ( Oxfordium ) | ||||||||||||
| 163.5 to 157.3 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Tuojiangosaurus | ||||||||||||
| Dong , Li, Zhou & Zhang, 1977 | ||||||||||||
| Art | ||||||||||||
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Tuojiangosaurus was a genus of dinosaurs from the stegosauria group . He lived in the early Upper Jurassic in East Asia.
features
Tuojiangosaurus reached a length of seven meters, making it a medium-sized stegosaur. Like all representatives of this group, it carried a double row of bone plates ( osteoderms ) on its back and tail . There were 17 pairs of plates, which were still round and plate-shaped on the neck and on the front half of the trunk, but triangular and spiky on the rear half of the trunk and tail. The plates at the level of the basin were the largest with up to 75 centimeters in length, while they became smaller again towards the tail. The function of these plates has not been fully clarified; enemy defense, courtship behavior , thermoregulation or a combination of these tasks are discussed .
Tuojiangosaurus had one or two pairs of pointed spines on the tip of its tail , which were used to repel enemies, as well as two spines in the shoulder region.
As with most stegosaurs, both fore and hind legs were very strong, and the hind limbs were significantly longer than the front ones. As a result, the head was positioned very close to the ground.
The skull was extremely flat and elongated, the tip of the snout was, like most stegosaurs, toothless. The high number of teeth is striking. As with all stegosaurs, these were small and approximately triangular and adapted to a vegetable diet.
Discovery and naming
Fossil remains of Tuojiangosaurus were found in the Shaximiao Formation in the Chinese province of Sichuan in the 1970s and were reported by Dong Zhiming et al. described. (Other stegosauria such as Huayangosaurus and Chungkingosaurus were found in the same formation .) The name is derived from the Tuo Jiang River , a tributary of the Yangtze River in Sichuan. The only species described and therefore type species is T. multispinus .
The finds are dated to the Upper Jurassic ( Oxfordian ) and an age of 163 to 157 million years.
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, p. 221, ISBN 978-0-691-13720-9 , online .