#anchisaurus

When the morning came, not a breath was heard.

Anchisaurus is a genus of basal sauropodomorph dinosaur which lived throughout what is now north eastern North America during the Early Jurassic Period some 200 to 192 million years ago. The first known remains of anchisaurus were uncovered by Mr. Solomon Ellsworth Jr. in 1818 while excavating a well with gunpowder in East Windsor, Connecticut. At the time of their discovery it was thought that the bones might be those of a human, but the presence of tail vertebrae falsified that idea. In 1855, the type specimen of Anchisaurus was found by William Smith in Springfield, Massachusetts during blasting a well for the waterhouse at the Springfield Armory. Unfortunately, both the East Windsor and Springfield specimens were severely damaged due to the blasting at the construction sites where they were found, and many of the bones were either accidentally thrown away by the workmen or kept by interested onlookers. As a result, these dinosaurs were only known from incomplete fragmentary remains. In 1863, the son of the ichnologist Edward Hitchcock, Edward Hitchcock Jr, described the Springfield remains in a supplement to his father's work on fossil footprints, suggesting they could explain a certain mysterious kind of reptile tracks. He then contacted the British paleontologist Richard Owen who advised him to name the finds as a new genus. Owen suggested the name Megadactylus, "large finger" in Greek, in reference to the enormous thumb of the animal. Hitchcock Jr himself then chose the specific name polyzelus, "much sought for" in Greek, referring to the fact that his father had for many years vainly sought to discover the identity of the track-maker. In 1877, Professor Othniel Charles Marsh had noted that the name Megadactylus had been preoccupied and in 1882, he replaced the name with Amphisaurus, "near saurian". In 1885, Marsh had discovered that this name also had been preoccupied, by the anthracosaurian Amphisaurus Barkas 1870, and again replaced it by Anchisaurus, with the same meaning. Meanwhile, nearly complete specimens had been found in Manchester, Connecticut. In 1884, a series of bridges was built over the Hop Creek. Sandstone blocks were sawed out of Wolcott's Quarry north of Buckland Station. On October 20th, an amateur paleontologist, Charles H. Owen, observed that a block had been removed containing the hind part of a skeleton. He warned Marsh who, using T. A. Bostwick as an intermediary, acquired the piece from the quarry owner, Charles O. Wolcott. Marsh tried to secure the front half of the skeleton but it had already been used in a bridge abutment. Eventually, when the bridge was demolished in August 1969, John Ostrom would save the front block and reunite the two halfs of the skeleton. Since then several more specimens in varying degrees of completion have been recovered. Reaching around 6.6 to 13.1ft (2 to 4m) in length and 44 to 70lbs (20 to 32kgs) in weight, Anchisaurus was rather small for a sauropodomorph dinosaur. According to the presence of cf. Otozoum tracks on the Connecticut Valley, Anchisaurus could reach even greater sizes which the largest known footprints indicating an animal that was around 20ft (6m) in size.

Art used in this video can be found at the following links

Anchisaurus, Brian Franczak

I really like dinosaurs though and the variant system so I decided to create fan-variants. Pictured below is the Ammosaurus/Anchisaurus.

Please ignore scientific inaccuracies.

The World of Dinosaurs. Written by L. B. Halstead. 1979.