Liubangosaurus (meaning "Liubang lizard", after Liubang village, the holotype locality) is a genus of sauropoddinosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous in what is now China. Liubangosaurus is known from the holotype NHMG 8152, five complete and articulated middle-caudal dorsal vertebrae that were collected from the Xinlong Formation in Fusui County, Guangxi Province. The type species is L. hei, which honors He Wenjian, who discovered the site where Liubangosaurus was discovered.[1]
Sauropod remains were first discovered at the Liubang Quarry in 2001, near the village of the same name (Liubang) which is near the city of Nanning in the Guangxi Province of southern China. This locality corresponds to the Napai Formation, which is Early Cretaceous in age. Subsequent excavations determined that remains from a minimum of three individual specimens were present in the quarry. The largest of these would eventually be described as the new genusFusuisaurus. The two smaller specimens were mostly disarticulated, which made it difficult for researchers to distinguish which bones belonged to which individuals. The remains were excavated with the help of the Natural History Museum of Guangxi, which is where the specimens were eventually stored. However, five caudal vertebrae among these remains were articulated, which was deemed sufficient to name and describe the new genus and species Liubangosaurus hei. It was fully described and named in 2010 by Mo Jinyou, Xu Xing, and Eric Buffetaut.[1]
Description
The holotype of Liubangosaurus was given the specimen number NHMG 8152. It consists of five articulated dorsal vertebrae, believed to represent the fifth through ninth dorsal vertebrae. The largest of these vertebrae (the fifth dorsal) has a total height of 710mm (28in).[1] The fragmentary nature of the specimen makes the full size of Liubangosaurus difficult to estimate. Rubén Molina-Pérez and Asier Larramendi estimated its full size as being 26m (85ft) long, 5.4m (18ft) tall at the shoulder, and 26 tons[2]
Despite consisting of only five vertebrae, the holotype of Liubangosaurus preserves several autapomorphies. These include features of the parapophyses , diapophyses , neural spines, and vertebral laminae. In particular, the vertebrae have a very distinctive "Y-shape" when viewed along their transverse plane.[1]
Classification
In their description of Liubangosaurus, Mo and colleagues conducted a phylogenetic analysis of neosauropods in order to determine the affinities of the new species. The trees they recovered were not very resolved and recovered Liubangosaurus in a polytomy with other groups of neosauropods. They suggested that it may be a close relative of the Late Jurassic genus Haplocanthosaurus, however they also caution that this assignment is very tentative due to the fragmentary nature of the holotype.[1] Philip Mannion and colleagues published a comprehensive analysis of titanosauriform relationships in 2013. They used two different analytical methods to test these relationships, and both methods recovered different relationships for Liubangosaurus.[3] The fragmentary nature of Liubangosaurus has served to complicate determinations of its phylogenetic affinities. Several recent analyses omit it entirely from their consensus trees.[4][5] Condensed versions of the cladograms recovered by Mo and colleagues and also by Mannion and colleagues are shown below.[1][3]
↑ Mocho, Pedro; Escaso, Fernando; Gasulla, José M.; Galobart, Àngel; Poza, Begoña; Santos-Cubedo, Andrés; Sanz, José L.; Ortega, Francisco (2024). "New sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Morella (Spain) provides new insights on the evolutionary history of Iberian somphospondylan titanosauriforms". Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 201: 214–268. doi:10.1093/zoolinnean/zlad124.
↑ Mo, Jinyou; Buffetaut, Eric; Tong, Haiyan; Amiot, Romain; Cavin, Lionel; Cuny, Gilles; Suteethorn, Varavudh; Suteethorn, Suravech; Jiang, Shan (2016). "Early Cretaceous vertebrates from the Xinlong Formation of Guangxi (Southern China): A review". Geological Magazine. 153 (1): 143–159. Bibcode:2016GeoM..153..143M. doi:10.1017/S0016756815000394.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
