Brachytrachelopan

Pan

infraorder. Small for a sauropod, Brachytrachelopan measured 10–11 metres (33–36 ft) in length and 5 metric tons (5.5 short tons) in body mass.^[1][2] Rauhut et al. (2005, 670) note that the high degree of fusion present between the preserved neural arches and their respective centra, as well as fusion between the sacral centra, sacral neural arches, and sacral neural spines is evidence that the holotype does not represent a juvenile animal. Hence, the small body size is not a relic of ontogeny.^[1]

apomorphies...include a pronounced, pillar-like centropostzygapophyseal lamina in the cervical vertebrae, a pronounced anterior inclination in the mid-cervical neural spines, with the tip of the spine extending beyond the anterior end of the centrum, and anterior dorsal neural spines one to six with vertical bases and anteriorly flexed tips."^[1]

Lower Cretaceous of South America. Rauhut et al. (2005, 671) conclude this is indicative of a rapid evolutionary radiation and dispersal of the Dicraeosauridae following the separation of the continents of the Southern and Northern Hemispheres during the latest Middle Jurassic

ornithopods." Such large iguanodontians are absent from the Late Jurassic Gondwanan sediments that have produced all known fossils of dicraeosaurids, while they are abundant in similar ecosystems of the same age in North America, where dicraeosaurids are absent. This may indicate that large iguanodontians and dicraeosaurids (especially Brachytrachelopan) were ecological analogs, resulting from parallel evolution in two distantly related dinosaurian lineages.^{[needs update}