Kangnasaurus

Holotype tooth of K. coetzeei (SAM 2732) as seen from three different angles; figured from Haughton (1915)[2]

Kangnasaurus was named in 1915 by Sidney H. Haughton. The type species is Kangnasaurus coetzeei. The generic name refers to the Kangnas farm; the specific name to the farmer, Coetzee. Kangnasaurus is based on holotype SAM 2732, a tooth found at a depth of 34 metres in a well at Farm Kangnas, in the Orange River valley of northern Cape Province, South Africa.[2] The age of these rocks, conglomerates in an ancient crater lake, is unclear; they are thought to be from the Early Cretaceous (probably early-Aptian).[3] Haughton thought SAM 2732 was a tooth from the upper jaw, but Michael Cooper reidentified it as a lower jaw tooth in 1985.[4] This had implications for its classification: Haughton thought the tooth was that of an iguanodontid,[2] while Cooper identified it as from an animal more like Dryosaurus, a more basal ornithopod.[4]

Haughton described several other fossils as possibly belonging to Kangnasaurus. These include five partial thigh bones, a partial thigh bone and shin bone, a partial metatarsal, a partial shin and foot, vertebrae, and unidentified bones. Some of the bones apparently came from other deposits, and Haughton was not certain that they all belonged to his new genus.[2] Cooper was also not certain, but described the other specimens as if they did belong to Kangnasaurus.[4]

Kangnasaurus is usually regarded as dubious,[5][6] although a 2007 review of dryosaurids by Ruiz-Omeñaca and colleagues retained it as potentially valid, differing from other dryosaurids by details of the thigh bone.[3] Like other basal iguanodontians, it would have been a bipedal herbivore.[6]

At least two recent studies have found it to be an elasmarian instead of a dryosaurid.[7][8]