Tharosaurus, first Middle Jurassic diplodocoid from Gondwana

[DD1991]

A newly published sauropod-related paper is now available online:

 

Bajpai, S., Datta, D., Pandey, P., Ghosh, T., Kumar, K., and Bhattacharya, D., 2023. Fossils of the oldest diplodocoid dinosaur suggest India was a major centre for neosauropod radiation. Scientific Reports 13. 12680. doi:10.1038/s41598-023-39759-2.

 

The discovery of Tharosaurus constitutes the first occurrence of a diplodocoid from India and also the second record from India of a neosauropod (the other being fragmentary macronarian remains described by Moser et al. [2006]), filling yet another gap in understanding the early paleobiogeography of diplodocoids in the Middle Jurassic. Several months, I happened to learn that Rivera-Sylva and Espinosa-Arrubarrena (2020) described diplodocid remains collected from the Bathonian-Callovian age Otlaltepec Formation in east-central Mexico, and those remains constitute the oldest record of a diplodocoid from North America and demonstrate that eusauropods dispersed from South America into western North America by the Middle Jurassic. Therefore, Tharosaurus indicus demonstrates that the oldest diplodocoids originated in southern Gondwana while the remains described by Rivera-Sylva and Espinosa-Arrubarrena (2020) show that eusauropods immigrated to western North America from Gondwana by the beginning of the Middle Jurassic as North America began separating from South America.

 

Moser, M., Mathur, U.B., Fürsich, F.T., Pandey, D.K., and Mathur, N., 2006. Oldest camarasauromorph sauropod (Dinosauria) discovered in the Middle Jurassic (Bajocian) of the Khadir Island, Kachchh, western India. Paläontologische Zeitschrift 80 (1): 34-51.

 

Rivera-Sylva, H. E., and Espinosa-Arrubarena, L., 2020, Remains of a diplodocid (Sauropoda: Flagellicaudata) from the Otlaltepec Formation Middle Jurassic (Bathonian-Callovian) from Puebla, Mexico. Paleontologia Mexicana 9 (3): 145-150.