Round One: Bagualia vs Amanzia
Bagualia (left) or Amanzia (right)?
Bagualia
Amanzia
Factfiles:
Bagualia alba
Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Wild horse of dawn
Time: 179 million years ago (Toarcian stage of the Early Jurassic)
Location: Cañadón Asfalto Formation, Spain
Described in 2020, Bagualia is currently the oldest known eusauropod (“true” sauropods), marking the point in sauropod evolutionary history where they began to get Huge. The beginning of the expansion of eusaruopod diversity also pretty closely marks the end of all other sauropodomorph lineages, which makes Bagualia an early indicator of a massive faunal shift that was about to occur. It’s also known from an almost entirely complete skull, which is a real rarity among sauropod species and always an exciting find!
Amanzia greppini
Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Named for 19th-century geologists Amanz Gressly and Jean-Baptiste Greppin
Time: 157 million years ago (Kimmeridgian stage of the Late Jurassic)
Location: Reuchenette Formation, Switzerland
Amanzia has been through a real odyssey of classifications. First discovered c. 1860, it was mistaken for a theropod and named Megalosaurus meriani in the 1870s, reclassified as a sauropod and named Ornithopsis greppini in 1922, then re-reclassified as a species of Cetiosauriscus in 1927, and then basically ignored ever since. Poor guy’s got an identity crisis now.
The actual fossils weren’t properly cleaned until 2003, and subsequent study in 2020 named it and revealed it was probably a turiasaur, an early-branching group of large sauropods that was unknown before the 2000s, so nobody working on it in the century and a half beforehand could have had any idea what they’d really found!
DMM Round One Masterpost
