Velafrons
| Velafrons | ||||||||||||
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Artistic life reconstruction of Velafrons |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Upper Cretaceous (late Campanium ) | ||||||||||||
| 73.5 million years | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Velafrons | ||||||||||||
| Gates et al., 2007 | ||||||||||||
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Velafrons is an extinct genus of Lambeosaurinae from the hadrosaur group . The only find so far comes from the Cerro del Pueblo Formation near the city of Rincon Colorado in Coahuila ( Mexico ) and is dated to the Upper Cretaceous (late Campanium ). Velafrons was founded in 2007 by Terry A. Gates et al. first scientifically described . The find ( holotype , copy number CPC-59) consists of a fragmentary skull and remains of the postcranium . The only species is Velafrons coahuilensis .
The name Velafrons ( sp. Vela - "sail", Latin frons - "forehead") means something like "forehead with sail" and indicates the sail-like head crest. The second part of the species name, coahuilensis , indicates Coahuila, the Mexican state from which the find comes.
features
The specimen found was probably a young animal, which is indicated by the proportionally large skull and not yet fused sutures on the vertebrae. Like other representatives of the Lambeosaurinae, Velafrons wore a hollow head comb. This comb was more similar to that of Corythosaurus and Hypacrosaurus than that of Lambeosaurus, and was flat and fan-shaped, but this probably does not correspond to the final adult comb shape. Despite these ontogenetic differences between young and adult animals, various unique features ( autapomorphies ) could be identified, which are presumably not due to ontogenesis and which can be used to delimit the genus; for example, the square leg showed a prominent bulge.
Systematics
Velafrons is a member of the Lambeosaurinae . The exact family relationships are unclear. A study by Prieto-Márquez and colleagues (2010) sees Velafrons as a derived genus of this subfamily and related to Olorotitan and Nipponosaurus . The following is a cladogram according to Prieto-Márquez (2010):
| Lambeosaurinae |
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Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Terry A. Gates, Scott D. Sampson, Carlos R. Delgado De Jesús, Lindsay E. Zanno, David Eberth, René Hernandez-Rivera, Martha C. Aguillón Martínez, James I. Kirkland : Velafrons coahuilensis, a new lambeosaurine hadrosaurid (Dinosauria: Ornithopoda) from the late Campanian Cerro del Pueblo Formation, Coahuila, Mexico. In: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Vol. 27, No. 4, 2007, ISSN 0272-4634 , pp. 917-930, doi : 10.1671 / 0272-4634 (2007) 27 [917: VCANLH] 2.0.CO; 2 .
- ^ Albert Prieto-Marquez: Global phylogeny of Hadrosauridae (Dinosauria: Ornithopoda) using parsimony and Bayesian methods. In: Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Vol. 159, No. 2, 2010, ISSN 0024-4082 , pp. 435-502, doi : 10.1111 / j.1096-3642.2009.00617.x .
