STEGOSAURIDES
a troublesome thyreophoran, possibly an ankylosaur or stegosaur, from the Early Cretaceous of China.
Pronunciation: STEG-oh-suh-RYE-deez
Meaning: Stegosaurus-shaped
Author/s: Bohlin (
1953)
Synonyms: Stegosauroides (Colbert, 1961)
First Discovery: Gansu, China
Acta Ordinal: #195
Stegosaurides excavatus
Stegosaurides was found, according to discoverer Birger Bohlin himself, "among very numerous and quite valueless fragments of ribs and possibly also of other bones". Unfortunately, its own remains, salvaged from that scatter, were hardly more inspiring: just a couple of fragmentary vertebrae and the base of an osteoderm, a bony plate in the skin that might once have supported a spine is Stegosaurides in its entirety. Yet Bohlin provisionally assigned it to Stegosauridae, a placement that has proven as shaky as the fossils themselves.
(Stegosaurus-Shaped, Hollowed-Out)Etymology
Stegosaurides is derived from
Stegosaurus (roof lizard) and the Greek "-eides" (shaped), referring to the supposed similarity of its fossils to those of
Stegosaurus.
The
species epithet,
excavatus (eks-kah-VAH-tus), means "hollowed out" in Latin and refers to a large depression on each side of its holotype osteoderm.
Discovery
The remains of
Stegosaurides were discovered in the Xinminbao Formation at "Hui Hui P'u" (Huihuipou), near Heishan, Gansu, during Sven Hedin-led Sino-Swedish
expeditions to the North-Western provinces of China in 1930-1931.
The
holotype (no specimen number provided) is two fragmentary
vertebrae and the base of a large osteoderm—a bony plate embedded in the skin that might have been tall, and presumably spike-shaped, if complete.
Estimations
Timeline:
Era: Mesozoic
Epoch: Early Cretaceous
Stage: Barremian-Aptian
Age range: 130-120 mya
Stats:
Est. max. length: ?
Est. max. hip height: ?
Est. max. weight: ?
Diet: Herbivore
References
• Bohlin B (1953) "Fossil reptiles from Mongolia and Kansu".
Reports from the scientific expedition to the North-Western provinces of China under the leadership of Sven Hedin. VI. Vertebrate Palaeontology 6. The Sino-Swedish Expedition Publication 37: 1-113.
• Maleev EA (1956) "Armored dinosaurs of the Upper Cretaceous of Mongolia: Family Ankylosauridae". Trudy Paleontologicheskogo Instituta Akademiy Nauk SSSR, 62: 54-91.
• Romer AS (1966) "Vertebrate paleontology".
• Steel R (1969) "Ornithischia". Page 1-67 in Kuhn (ed.) "Handbuch
der Paläoherpetologie".
• Maryanska T (1977) "Ankylosauridae (Dinosauria) from Mongolia".
• Tumanova TA (1987) "
The armoured dinosaurs of Mongolia".
The Joint Soviet-Mongolian Paleontological Expedition Transaction, 32: 1-76. [English translation by Ruth Griffith, edited by Kenneth Carpenter and T. A. Tumanova.]
• Weishampel DB, Barrett PM, Coria RA, Le Loeuff J, Xu X, Zhao X, Sahni A, Gomani EMP and Noto CR (2004) "Dinosaur Distribution". Page 567 in Weishampel, Dodson and Osmólska (eds.) "
The Dinosauria: Second Edition".
• Dong Z (1992) "
Dinosaurian faunas of China".
China Ocean Press, Beijing.
• Arbour VM and Currie PJ (2016) "Systematics, phylogeny and palaeobiogeography of the ankylosaurid dinosaurs".
Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 14(5): 385-444. DOI: 10.1080/14772019.2015.1059985.
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To cite this page:
Atkinson, L.
"
STEGOSAURIDES :: from DinoChecker's dinosaur archive".
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