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| Mamenchisaurus youngi |
...Two talks focused on the incredible Chinese mamenchisaurids, famous for their ridiculous necks (consisting of 16-17 vertebrae and, in cases, being four times as long as the body). In recent years a large number of new mamenchisaurid taxa have been named, and even the genus Mamenchisaurus itself now contains eight species. While these Mamenchisaurus species are superficially similar, it’s generally agreed that they likely aren’t close relatives. So it wasn’t really a surprise when a new cladistic analysis presented by Toru Sekiya scattered Mamenchisaurus to the four winds, though this was preliminary (one Mamenchisaurus species was recovered in a very counter-intuitive/startling position). It’s not as appreciated as it should be that some mamenchisaurids were truly enormous – there are mass estimates for some of the species that exceed 70 tons.
José Carbadillo discussed the growth changes that occur in the vertebrae of the dwarf European titanosauriform Europasaurus [adjacent photo by Ghedoghedo]. For those who don’t know, this was an island-endemic dwarf sauropod, at most 6 m long and less than 1.5 m tall at the shoulder. TheEuropasaurus situation has become more complicated now we know that some animals reached skeletal maturity at much smaller body size than others – this seems to show that there are actually two europasaur taxa in the assemblage, both of which are dwarfs. Also on axial morphology, Francisco Gascó discussed the vertebral anatomy of the Spanish sauropods Losillasaurus and Turiasaurus, both of which seem to be part of the recently recognised non-neosauropod clade Turiasauria. You probably know that Francisco (aka Paco) blogs at El Pakozoico.... [1]
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2012/01/09/second-workshop-on-sauropod-biology-part-ii/
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| Europasaurus - Dwarf European Titanosauriform |
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