Tapuiasaurus

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Tapuiasaurus
Temporal range:
Ma
Reconstructed skeleton, Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Clade: Dinosauria
Clade: Saurischia
Clade: Sauropodomorpha
Clade: Sauropoda
Clade: Macronaria
Clade: Titanosauria
Genus: Tapuiasaurus
Zaher et al. 2011
Species:
T. macedoi
Binomial name
Tapuiasaurus macedoi
Zaher et al. 2011
Restoration
Skull of the type specimen
The view of the fossils when discovered
Location of where the fossils were found

Tapuiasaurus (meaning "

period (Aptian age) in what is now Minas Gerais, Brazil
.

Discovery

Its fossils, including a partial skeleton with a nearly complete skull, have been recovered from the Quiricó Formation of the São Francisco Basin in Minas Gerais, eastern Brazil. This genus was named by Hussam Zaher, Diego Pol, Alberto B. Carvalho, Paulo M. Nascimento, Claudio Riccomini, Peter Larson, Rubén Juárez Valieri, Ricardo Pires Domingues, Nelson Jorge da Silva Jr. and Diógenes de Almeida Campos in 2011, and the type species is Tapuiasaurus macedoi.[1]

Classification

Tapuiasaurus was originally assigned to Nemegtosauridae by its original describers, but two subsequent cladistic analyses have recovered it as only distantly related to Nemegtosaurus, with Wilson et al. (2016) recovering the genus outside the Lithostrotia, and Carballido et al. (2017) recovering it as closely related to the Gondwanan lithostrotians Isisaurus and Rapetosaurus.[2][3]

References