In June 2021, ordinary work was going on at a construction site in Ganxian District, Ganzhou City, but today was an unusual day, because as soon as the forklift driver shoveled down, he suddenly saw the lines of huge bones. How huge is it? The forklift driver visually inspected it and found that the thickness of the bones seemed to be about the same as the pole at the front of the forklift! So the workers immediately contacted the relevant departments.
Soon a professional team led by the Jiangxi Provincial Geological Museum arrived. After preliminary cleaning and identification of the large bones, they determined that these bone fossils came from the Cretaceous Titan 90 million years ago. Dragon, whose completeness is relatively rare among Cretaceous sauropod dinosaurs.
The fossil preservation of this titanosaur It is very complete, with 29 vertebrae left. The most important thing is that its bones are thick, and the vertebral bodies and vertebral arches of the cervical and tail vertebrae also have complex chambers typical of sauropod dinosaurs! This means that its vertebrae are interconnected and well preserved, which is of great significance for studying all aspects of them, including their feeding habits, mode of movement, evolution, geographical distribution and recovery maps. Therefore, at this point, this fossil is Globally rare.
Han Fenglu, associate professor at the School of Earth Sciences of China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), who is responsible for this research, said: "Although they are both sauropod dinosaurs, the new specimen has the same dorsal vertebrae morphology as the Chinese Gannanosaurus previously discovered in Ganzhou. There are differences in them. Based on the phylogenetic analysis of more than 500 characters, we further classified it into the titanosaur branch of sauropod dinosaurs."
The current morphology of this specimen , system evolution and geographical distribution are still under further study. However, based on the existing skeletal information, it is estimated that the length of this dinosaur should be more than 15 meters! This value is an exaggeration, but it is only a medium size among sauropods.
Every time we see dinosaur fossils, we hear terms such as theropod and sauropod. What do these mean?
About dinosaurs?
Dinosaurs are both familiar and unfamiliar species to humans. Everyone knows about dinosaurs. Many well-known dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Velociraptor, etc. are known to all young and old. But in fact, most people have no idea what kind of animals dinosaurs are. How many dinosaurs are there?
