New Fossil Analysis Reveals Dinosaur With 50-Foot Neck

[Oxytropidoceras]

Long Island Scientist Discovers Dinosaur Neck Longer 

Than a School Bus. The neck measured to roughly 49 and

a half feet long, or big enough to stretch across five 

parking spots — and then some

By Greg Cergol, 4 News, New York, March 16, 2023

 

New Fossil Analysis Reveals Dinosaur With 50-Foot Neck

SciTechDaily, March 17, 2023

 

The open access paper is:

 

Moore, A.J., Barrett, P.M., Upchurch, P., Liao, C.C., Ye, Y., 

Hao, B. and Xu, X., 2023. Re-assessment of the Late Jurassic

eusauropod Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum Russell and

Zheng, 1993, and the evolution of exceptionally long necks 

in mamenchisaurids. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 21(1), p.2171818.

 

Yours,

 

Paul H.

[DD1991]

Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum was discovered in the late 1980s and described to science in a paper published in 1993 (30 years ago). The paper by Moore and colleagues re-evaluating M. sinocanadorum also happens to test Daanosaurus in a cladistic context, recovering it and Bellusaurus (the latter recovered as a basal macronarian in the description of Yuzhoulong and two recent papers re-evaluating Dashanpusaurus) as a mamenchisaurid in most phylogenetic analyses. Also note that the results of cladistic analysis by Moore et al. (2023) agree with papers published in the 2009-2019 in recovering Euhelopus inside Macronaria, indicating that any morphological similarities between Klamelisaurus and a few euhelopodids noted by Moore et al. (2020) in their re-assessment of Klamelisaurus are convergent.

 

As a side note, the holotype of Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum is limited to a few bones (mandible, anteriormost cervicals, an ectopterygoid, quadrate, and pterygoid), so the possibility that one or two mamenchisaurid taxa described from the Shangshaximiao Formation of Sichuan in the 1980s and 1990s could be conspecific with M. sinocanadorum. 

 

Moore, A. J., P. Upchurch, P. M. Barrett, J. M. Clark, and Xu, X., 2020. Osteology of Klamelisaurus gobiensis (Dinosauria: Eusauropoda) and the evolutionary history of Middle–Late Jurassic Chinese sauropods. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 18 (16):1299–1393.