a plant-eating brachiosaurid sauropod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of North America.
Pronunciation: SEE-duh-ro-SOR-us
Meaning: Cedar lizard
Author/s: Tidwell
et al. (
1999)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Utah, USA
Discovery Chart Position: #461
Cedarosaurus weiskopfae
The slender-for-a-macronarian, badly weathered and trampled fossils of
Cedarosaurus were discovered in the same area as
Venenosaurus and
Brontomerus, though at a much lower (and thus older) level than either. It was lacking a head, a neck, much in the way of overlapping parts that can be compared to other sauropods and hardly anything with a feature you could confidently single out as unique... aside from five score and fifteen plant-grinding gastroliths (gizzard stones), all but three of which were discovered in what would have been its gut before it died, lost bits and turned into a disarticulated jumble.
(Carol Weiskopf's Cedar Mountain lizard)Etymology
Cedarosaurus is derived from "Cedar" (for the Cedar Mountain Formation, where the type specimen was collected) and the Greek "sauros" (lizard).
The
species epithet,
weiskopfae (WIES-kop-fee), honours the late Carol Weiskopf for her work in the field and lab'.
Discovery
The remains of
Cedarosaurus were discovered in the Yellow Cat Member of the Cedar Mountain Formation, Grand County, Utah, USA, by Denver Museum of Natural History volunteer Billy Kinneer in 1996. The
holotype (DMNH 39045) is a partial, skull-and-neckless skeleton, including 8 back and 25 tail vertebrae, ribs and chevrons, a partial shoulder girdle, a right arm minus most of the hand, a partial pelvic girdle, most of a right leg, and 115 gastroliths, 112 of which were piled in the belly region.
A partial hind limb (FMNH PR 977) from the Glen Rose Formation, 20 km south of
Decatur, Texas, that was previously referred to "
Pleurocoelus sp." by Langston in 1974 and described by Gallup in 1989, was assigned to
Cedarosaurus by Michael D'Emic in 2012.
• Langston W (1974) "Nonmammalian Comanchean tetrapods".
Geoscience and Man, 8: 77–102.
• Gallup MR (1975) "Lower Cretaceous dinosaurs and associated vertebrates from north-central Texas in the Field Museum
of Natural History".
Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of
Texas, Austin: 1-318.
• Gallup MR (1989) "Functional morphology of the hindfoot of the Texas sauropod
Pleurocoelus sp. indet. Page 71–74 in Farlow (ed.) "Paleobiology of the Dinosaurs".
Geological Society of America Special Paper, 238.
• Tidwell V, Carpenter K and Brooks W (1999) "New sauropod from the Lower Cretaceous of Utah, USA".
Oryctos, 2: 21-37.
• Tidwell V, Carpenter K and Meyer S (2001) "New Titanosauriform (Sauropoda) from the Poison Strip Member of the Cedar Mountain Formation (Lower Cretaceous), Utah". In Tanke and Carpenter (eds.) "
Mesozoic Vertebrate Life".
• Sanders F, Manley K and Carpenter K (2001) "Gastroliths from the Lower Cretaceous sauropod Cedarosaurus weiskopfae". In Tanke and Carpenter (eds.) "
Mesozoic Vertebrate Life".
• Upchurch P, Barrett PM and Dodson P (2004) "Sauropoda". In Weishampel, Dodson and Osmólska (eds.) "
The Dinosauria: Second Edition".
• Paul GS (2010) "
The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs".
• D'Emic MD (2012) "
Revision of the sauropod dinosaurs of the Lower Cretaceous Trinity Group, southern USA, with the description of a new genus".
Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 11(6): 707-726. DOI: 10.1080/14772019.2012.667446.
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To cite this page:
Atkinson, L.
"
CEDAROSAURUS :: from DinoChecker's dinosaur archive".
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http://www.dinochecker.com/dinosaurs/CEDAROSAURUS›. Web access: 07th Mar 2026.
