Susannah Maidment | |
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![]() Maidment in 2018 | |
Other names | Susie Maidment |
Alma mater | Imperial College London University of Cambridge |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Natural History Museum, London University of Birmingham |
Susannah "Susie" Catherine Rose Maidment is a British palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London. [1] She is also an honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham. She is internationally recognised for her research on ornithischian dinosaur evolution, and was awarded the 2016 Hodson Award [2] of the Palaeontological Association and the 2017 Lyell Fund of the Geological Society of London. [3] [4] She was featured as a 2019 National Geographic Women of Impact. [5]
Maidment studied geology at Imperial College London, graduating with an MSc in 2003. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2007, in which she studied the systematics of the dinosaur group Stegosauria. [1] [4] [6] Her research was supervised by David Norman and Paul Upchurch. [7] Following time working as an exploration geologist in Vietnam, [1] she moved in 2009 to work with Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum, London, as a postdoctoral researcher co-investigator on a NERC-funded project [8] on ornithischian dinosaur locomotion. [9] [10]
In 2012 she returned to Imperial College London as a Research Fellow, before moving in 2016 to the University of Brighton as a Senior Lecturer. [1] In 2018 she re-joined the Natural History Museum, where she works as a senior researcher. [1] She is an honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham. [11]
Maidment has published more than 50 scientific papers, primarily focused on the systematics, evolution and palaeobiology of ornithischian dinosaurs. [12] She has worked extensively on stegosaurs, and is considered the world leader on this group. [4] Her contributions have included overall revisions of the systematics of the group, [6] [13] [14] the description of the Portuguese stegosaur Miragaia , [15] the description of the oldest known stegosaur, Adratiklit , from the Middle Jurassic of Morocco, [16] [17] the oldest known ankylosaurian Spicomellus , also from Morocco, [18] anatomical and systematic revisions of Chinese stegosaurs, [19] [20] and work on the postcranial skeleton and body mass of Stegosaurus . [21] [22] [23] She has also published several papers on locomotion and the evolution of quadrupedality in ornithischian dinosaurs. [9] [10] [24]
In 2015, she was part of a team who reported evidence of original collagen fibres and blood cells in Cretaceous dinosaur specimens. [25] [26] [27] Her most recent research has focused on the stratigraphy of the Morrison Formation of the Western United States. [4] [28] [29] [30] She was one of the lead scientists for the "Mission Jurassic" dinosaur excavation project that began in 2019. [31] [32]
In 2023, she was scientific advisor for the tv series Prehistoric Planet .
Stegosaurus is a genus of herbivorous, four-legged, armored dinosaur from the Late Jurassic, characterized by the distinctive kite-shaped upright plates along their backs and spikes on their tails. Fossils of the genus have been found in the western United States and in Portugal, where they are found in Kimmeridgian- to Tithonian-aged strata, dating to between 155 and 145 million years ago. Of the species that have been classified in the upper Morrison Formation of the western US, only three are universally recognized: S. stenops, S. ungulatus and S. sulcatus. The remains of over 80 individual animals of this genus have been found. Stegosaurus would have lived alongside dinosaurs such as Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Camarasaurus and Allosaurus, the latter of which may have preyed on it.
Thyreophora is a group of armored ornithischian dinosaurs that lived from the Early Jurassic until the end of the Cretaceous.
Ankylosauria is a group of herbivorous dinosaurs of the clade Ornithischia. It includes the great majority of dinosaurs with armor in the form of bony osteoderms, similar to turtles. Ankylosaurs were bulky quadrupeds, with short, powerful limbs. They are known to have first appeared in the Middle Jurassic, and persisted until the end of the Cretaceous Period. The two main families of Ankylosaurs, Nodosauridae and Ankylosauridae are primarily known from the Northern Hemisphere, but the more basal Parankylosauria are known from southern Gondwana during the Cretaceous.
Kentrosaurus is a genus of stegosaurid dinosaur from the Late Jurassic in Lindi Region of Tanzania. The type species is K. aethiopicus, named and described by German palaeontologist Edwin Hennig in 1915. Often thought to be a "primitive" member of the Stegosauria, several recent cladistic analyses find it as more derived than many other stegosaurs, and a close relative of Stegosaurus from the North American Morrison Formation within the Stegosauridae.
Hesperosaurus is a herbivorous stegosaurian dinosaur from the Kimmeridgian age of the Jurassic period, approximately 156 million years ago.
Chialingosaurus is a genus of herbivorous stegosaurian dinosaur similar to Kentrosaurus from the Upper Shaximiao Formation, Late Jurassic beds in Sichuan Province in China. Its age makes it one of the oldest species of stegosaurs, living about 160 million years ago. Since it was an herbivore, scientists think that Chialingosaurus probably ate ferns and cycads, which were plentiful during the period when Chialingosaurus was alive.
Wuerhosaurus is a genus of stegosaurid dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous Period of China and Mongolia. As such, it was one of the last genera of stegosaurians known to have existed.
Lexovisaurus is a genus of stegosaur from mid-to-Late Jurassic Europe, 165.7-164.7 mya. Fossils of limb bones and armor fragments have been found in middle to late Jurassic-aged strata of England and France.
Paranthodon is a genus of stegosaurian dinosaur that lived in what is now South Africa during the Early Cretaceous, between 139 and 131 million years ago. Discovered in 1845, it was one of the first stegosaurians found. Its only remains, a partial skull, isolated teeth, and fragments of vertebrae, were found in the Kirkwood Formation. British paleontologist Richard Owen initially identified the fragments as those of the pareiasaur Anthodon. After remaining untouched for years in the British Museum of Natural History, the partial skull was identified by South African paleontologist Robert Broom as belonging to a different genus; he named the specimen Palaeoscincus africanus. Several years later, Hungarian paleontologist Franz Nopcsa, unaware of Broom's new name, similarly concluded that it represented a new taxon, and named it Paranthodon owenii. Since Nopcsa's species name was assigned after Broom's, and Broom did not assign a new genus, both names are now synonyms of the current binomial, Paranthodon africanus. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek para (near) with the genus name Anthodon, to represent the initial referral of the remains.
Stegosauria is a group of herbivorous ornithischian dinosaurs that lived during the Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods. Stegosaurian fossils have been found mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, predominantly in what is now North America, Europe, Africa, South America and Asia. Their geographical origins are unclear; the earliest unequivocal stegosaurian, Bashanosaurus primitivus, was found in the Bathonian Shaximiao Formation of China.
Stegosauridae is a family of thyreophoran dinosaurs within the suborder Stegosauria. The clade is defined as all species of dinosaurs more closely related to Stegosaurus than Huayangosaurus. The name ‘Stegosauridae’ is thus a stem-based name taken from the well-represented genus – Stegosaurus. Fossil evidence of stegosaurids, dating from the Middle Jurassic through the Early Cretaceous, have been recovered from North America, Eurasia and Africa.
Huayangosauridae is a family of stegosaurian dinosaurs from the Jurassic of China. The group is defined as all taxa closer to the namesake genus Huayangosaurus than Stegosaurus, and was originally named as the family Huayangosaurinae by Dong Zhiming and colleagues in the description of Huayangosaurus. Huayangosaurinae was originally differentiated by the remaining taxa within Stegosauridae by the presence of teeth in the premaxilla, an antorbital fenestra, and a mandibular fenestra. Huayangosaurinae, known from the Middle Jurassic of the Shaximiao Formation, was proposed to be intermediate between Scelidosaurinae and Stegosaurinae, suggesting that the origins of stegosaurs lay in Asia. Following phylogenetic analyses, Huayangosauridae was expanded to also include the taxon Chungkingosaurus, known from specimens from younger Late Jurassic deposits of the Shaximiao Formation. Huayangosauridae is either the sister taxon to all other stegosaurs, or close to the origin of the clade, with taxa like Gigantspinosaurus or Isaberrysaura outside the Stegosauridae-Huayangosauridae split. Huayangosauridae was formally defined in 2021 by Daniel Madzia and colleagues, who used the previous definitions of all taxa closer to Huayangosaurus taibaii than Stegosaurus stenops, and chose the 2020 phylogeny of Susannah Maidment et al. to illustrate the relationships of the clade:
Chungkingosaurus, meaning "Chongqing Lizard", is a genus of herbivorous dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Upper Shaximiao Formation in what is now China. It is a member of the Stegosauria.
Hypsirhophus is a genus of stegosaurian dinosaurs. It contains a single species, Hypsirhophus discurus, which is known only from a fragmentary specimen. The fossil consists of partial vertebrae from the back, three from the tail, and a piece of rib.
Loricatosaurus is a Stegosaurid genus from Callovian-age rocks of England and France.
Alcovasaurus, alternatively known as Miragaia longispinus, is a genus of herbivorous stegosaurian dinosaur that lived in the Late Jurassic. It was found in the Morrison Formation of Natrona County, Wyoming, United States. The type species is Stegosaurus longispinus, later given the genus Alcovasaurus.
This timeline of stegosaur research is a chronological listing of events in the history of paleontology focused on the stegosaurs, the iconic plate-backed, spike-tailed herbivorous eurypod dinosaurs that predominated during the Jurassic period. The first scientifically documented stegosaur remains were recovered from Early Cretaceous strata in England during the mid-19th century. However, they would not be recognized as a distinct group of dinosaurs until Othniel Charles Marsh described the new genus and species Stegosaurus armatus in 1877, which he regarded as the founding member of the Stegosauria. This new taxon originally included all armored dinosaurs. It was not until 1927 that Alfred Sherwood Romer implemented the modern use of the name Stegosauria as specifically pertaining to the plate-backed and spike-tailed dinosaurs.
Bashanosaurus is an extinct genus of stegosaurian dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic Shaximiao Formation of Yunyang County, China. The genus contains a single species, Bashanosaurus primitivus, known from incomplete skeletons belonging to three individuals. It is one of the basalmost stegosaurs, as well as one of the oldest known stegosaurs, along with Adratiklit, Isaberrysaura, and Thyreosaurus.