SUPERSAURUS
a plant-eating apatosaurine sauropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of North America.
Pronunciation: SOO-per-SOR-us
Meaning: Super lizard
Author/s: Jenson (
1985)
Synonyms: See
below
First Discovery: Colorado, USA
Discovery Chart Position: #318
Supersaurus vivianae
(Vivian Jones' super lizard)Etymology
Supersaurus is derived from the Latin "super" (above) and the Greek "sauros" (lizard), named for its immense size.
The
species epithet,
vivianae, honours Vivian Jones.
Discovery
The first remains of
Supersaurus were discovered at Dry Mesa Quarry in the Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison Formation, Montrose County, Colorado, USA, by Daniel Edwin "Eddie" Jones and Vivian Jones of Delta, Colorado, in 1972.
The
holotype (BYU 12962, originally BYU 5500), collected by James A. Jensen in 1979, is a 2.4 meter high right shoulder girdle (scapulocoracoid).
The matching shoulder girdle (BYU 9025, originally BYU 5501), an ischium or hip bone (BYU 12946, originally BYU 5502), and a series of 12 tail vertebrae (BYU 9084, originally BYU 5504) were found close by. As were BYU 4839, BYU 9044, BYU 9045, BYU 9085, BYU 10612, BYU 12424, BYU 12555, BYU 12639, BYU 12819, BYU 12861, BYU 12946, BYU 12962, BYU 13016, BYU 13018, BYU 13981, BYU 16679, BYU 17462, and so on, which are new ascension numbers for old material. Some of those have been shipped off elswhere or discarded as non diognostic. However, the most interesting of the referred material is BYU 9024 (originally BYU 5503), a 1358mm long vertebrae with the longest centrum of any sauropod vertebra ever found, which led some palaeontologists to conclude that the complete neck of
Supersaurus was over 16 metres long! The latter was assigned to
Barosaurus by Taylor and Wedel in 2019, but Curtice moved it back to
Supersaurus in 2021.
The most complete known specimen is an extremely large and incredibly old individual (WDC DMJ-021), nicknamed "Jimbo", found by Brandon Flyr and Bart Lesco in the Morrison Formation near Douglas City, Converse County, Wyoming, USA, in 1996 and described by Lovelace
et al. in 2007. All in all, around 30% of the skeleton was recovered.
Estimations
Timeline:
Era: Mesozoic
Epoch: Late Jurassic
Stage: Kimmeridgian
Age range: 156-151 mya
Stats:
Est. max. length: 35 meters
Est. max. hip height: ?
Est. max. weight: 40 tons
Diet: Herbivore
Dystylosaurus edwini (Jensen, 1985)
(From the Greek "di" [two], "stylos" [beam] and "sauros" [lizard], and for Daniel Edwin [Eddie] Jones).
The holotype (BYU 5750) is a back vertebra, collected by Jensen in 1972 from the Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison Formation.
Ultrasaurus macintoshi (Jensen, 1985)
(From the Latin "ultra" [beyond] and the Greek "sauros" [lizard], and for sauropod expert John S. McIntosh).
The holotype (BYU 9044, originally listed as BYU 5000) is a back vertebra, collected by Jensen in 1979 from the Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison Formation. A shoulder girdle (BYU 9462) was also assigned here but belongs to a brachiosaurid. Its vertebra, however, belongs to a huge diplodocid and that huge diplodocid is...
Supersaurus.
Ultrasauros macintoshi (Olshevsky, 1991) is a replacement name for the above-mentioned
Ultrasaurus, because Kim Haang Moo had already assigned that name to a much less spectacular and highly dubious Korean sauropod in 1983. Kim's
Ultrasaurus wasn't as big as initially assumed, because he mistook a humerus (an upper arm bone) for an ulna (one of two lower arm bones).
References
• Jensen JA (1985) "
Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado".
The Great Basin Naturalist, 45(4): 697-709. DOI: 10.5962/bhl.part.4439
• Curtice B, Stadtman K and Curtice L (1996) "
A re-assessment of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen, 1985)".
Page 87–95 in Morales (ed.) "The Continental Jurassic: Transactions of the Continental Jurassic Symposium". Volume 60. Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin.
• Wedel MJ (1997) "Postcranial Pneumaticity in Dinosaurs and the Origin of the Avian Lung". [dissertation]
• Curtice B, Stadtman K and Curtice L (2001) "The demise of
Dystylosaurus edwini and a revision of
Supersaurus vivianae".
Page 33–40 in McCord, and Boaz (eds.) "Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists and Southwest Paleontological Symposium - Proceedings 2001". Mesa Southwest Museum Bulletin. Volume 8.
• Lovelace DM (2006) "An Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation fire-induced debris flow: Taphonomy and paleoenvironment of a sauropod (Sauropoda:
Supersaurus vivianae) locality, east-central Wyoming".
Page 47-56 in Foster and Lucas eds. "Paleontology and geology of the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation". New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 36.
• Lovelace DM, Hartman SA and Wahl WR (2007) "
Morphology of a specimen of Supersaurus (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from the Morrison Formation of Wyoming, and a re-evaluation of diplodocid phylogeny".
Arquivos do Museu Nacional, 65(4): 527–544.
• Paul GS (2016)
The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs: Second Edition".
• Curtice B (2021) "
New Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry Supersaurus vivianae (Jensen 1985) axial elements provide additional insight into its phylogenetic relationships and size, suggesting an animal that exceeded 39 meters in length".
Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Virtual Meeting Conference Program. Page 92.
• Farlow JO, Coroian D, Currie PJ, Foster JR, Mallon JC and Therrien F (2022) ""Dragons" on the landscape: Modeling the abundance of large carnivorous dinosaurs of the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation (USA) and the Upper Cretaceous Dinosaur Park Formation (Canada)".
The Anatomical Record. DOI: 10.1002/ar.25024
• Woodruff DC, Curtice BD and Foster JR (2024) "Seis-ing up the Super-Morrison formation sauropods".
Journal of Anatomy. DOI: 10.1111/joa.14108.
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"
SUPERSAURUS :: from DinoChecker's dinosaur archive".
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