Tapuiasaurus
Tapuiasaurus (meaning "Tapuia lizard") is a genus of titanosaur which lived during the Lower Cretaceous period (Aptian age) in what is now Minas Gerais, Brazil.
| Tapuiasaurus Temporal range: Aptian ~ | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Reconstructed skeleton, Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo | |
Scientific classification  | |
| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Clade: | Saurischia |
| Clade: | †Sauropodomorpha |
| Clade: | †Sauropoda |
| Clade: | †Macronaria |
| Clade: | †Titanosauria |
| Clade: | †Lithostrotia |
| Genus: | †Tapuiasaurus Zaher et al. 2011 |
| Species: | †T. macedoi |
| Binomial name | |
| †Tapuiasaurus macedoi Zaher et al. 2011 | |
Discovery
Its fossils, including a partial skeleton with a nearly complete skull, have been recovered from the Quiricó Formation of the São Francisco Basin in Minas Gerais, eastern Brazil. This genus was named by Hussam Zaher, Diego Pol, Alberto B. Carvalho, Paulo M. Nascimento, Claudio Riccomini, Peter Larson, Rubén Juárez Valieri, Ricardo Pires Domingues, Nelson Jorge da Silva Jr. and Diógenes de Almeida Campos in 2011, and the type species is Tapuiasaurus macedoi.[1]
Classification
Tapuiasaurus was originally assigned to Nemegtosauridae by its original describers, but two subsequent cladistic analyses have recovered it as only distantly related to Nemegtosaurus, with Wilson et al. (2016) recovering the genus outside the Lithostrotia, and Carballido et al. (2017) recovering it as closely related to the Gondwanan lithostrotians Isisaurus and Rapetosaurus.[2][3]
References
- Hussam Zaher; Diego Pol; Alberto B. Carvalho; Paulo M. Nascimento; Claudio Riccomini; Peter Larson; Rubén Juarez-Valieri; Ricardo Pires-Domingues; Nelson Jorge da Silva Jr.; Diógenes de Almeida Campos (2011). "A Complete Skull of an Early Cretaceous Sauropod and the Evolution of Advanced Titanosaurians". PLOS ONE. 6 (2): e16663. Bibcode:2011PLoSO...616663Z. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016663. PMC 3034730. PMID 21326881.
- Wilson, J. A., Pol, D., Carvalho, A. B. and Zaher, H. (2016), The skull of the titanosaur Tapuiasaurus macedoi (Dinosauria: Sauropoda), a basal titanosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Brazil. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. doi:10.1111/zoj.12420
- Carballido, J.L.; Pol, D.; Otero, A.; Cerda, I.A.; Salgado, L.; Garrido, A.C.; Ramezani, J.; Cúneo, N.R.; Krause, J.M. (2017). "A new giant titanosaur sheds light on body mass evolution among sauropod dinosaurs". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 284 (1860): 20171219. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.1219.
