A dinosaur skull found in southern China appears to be an entirely new species, according to a team of paleontologists who examined the specimen.
Paleontologists have discovered a fossilized skull in Yunnan Province in China’s Lufeng Dinosaur National Geopark. The team determined that the skull belonged to a sauropodomorph—a group of dinosaurs that included large herbivorous sauropods such as Brachiosaurus-although completely new in the history of science.
The research team named the animal Lishulong wangi—”lishu” is from the Chinese spelling for the chestnut tree, “long” is a reference to the dragon, and “wangi” is from the vertebrate of the same name.
The team believes that Lishulong wangi it can grow up to 33 feet (10 meters) tall. The team’s findings were published last month in PeerJ.
“Based on current fossil records, Lishulong wangi is the largest sauropodomorph from the Early Jurassic epoch in China, and is considered to be emotionally mature,” the group wrote in the paper.
The team added that the animal has the largest skull of all known sauropodomorphs from Lufeng, indicating that researchers may need to re-examine related data to better understand the size of animals in the group.
Zhang said LiveScience that the giant dinosaur was probably a herbivore, and cannot be distinguished from its sister taxa—Yunnanosaurus-with its big noses. The skull of this animal is 15.75 inches (40 centimeters) long, beating the largest skull in the region (correct Jingshanosaurus for example) about two inches (5 cm).
A giant skull has recently been found in China. In 2023, the team uncovers the remains of a mammal that apparently hunted a beaked dinosaur; last year, a group of paleontologists published evidence to the contrary, with the shape of a mammal’s foot inside a fossil. Microraptor.
In 2021, paleontologists published several fossils found in this country, including the remains of a nesting oviraptor (filled with dinosaur eggs), the amazing remains of a dinosaur cloaca, and 500 million-year-old penis worms from Yunnan, the same. in the province where paleontologists discovered L. wangi.
The team recommended that it be found L. wangi it can provide information about the distribution of the animal and its close dinosaur relatives throughout the ancient continents of the world.
“The paleobiodiversity of the first sauropodomorphs from Gondwana appears to have declined slightly after the Triassic-Jurassic boundary,” the researchers wrote. “Therefore, we think that a non-sauropodomorph species survived and spread rapidly in Laurasia, especially in China.” In other words, the first sauropodomorphs descended from Gondwana but flourished and diversified in Laurasia, especially in China.
However Lishulong wangi Not as big as other really big sauropods like the titanosaurs, the animal still blew modern land animals out of existence. water country,. The newly described fossil is on display at the Lufeng World Dinosaur Valley museum.