#haplocanthosaurus

A simple Haplocanthosaurus sauropod dinosaur cardmodel in four(4) hyper-realistic colors.

Dinosaur March Madness Round One: Game Fifteen

Haplocanthosaurus versus Nemegtosaurus!

Feel free to debate about which one YOU think people should vote for, right on this post! Voting starts the first weekend of March!

Source: http://dinopedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Haplocanthosaurus-standing-in-the-forest.jpg

Name: Haplocanthosaurus priscus, H. delfsi

Name Meaning: Simple Spined Lizard 

First Described: 1903

Described By: Hatcher

Classification: Dinosauria, Saurischia, Eusaurischia, Sauropodomorpha,Plateosauria, Massopoda, Sauropodiformes, Anchisauria, Sauropoda, Gravisauria, Eusauropoda, Neosauropoda, Diplodocoidea, Haplocanthosauridae

Haplocanthosaurus is potentially our first diplodocid - the group of sauropods that includes famous dinosaur such as Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus (yes it’s real again, more on that when we get to it), and Diplodocus. It lived about 155 to 152 million years ago, in the Kimmeridgian age of the late Jurassic. It lived in the Morrison Formation - you know, where all the famous Jurassic dinosaurs lived. It was one of the smallest sauropods of the region, only about 14.8 meters long compared to some sauropods in the area that were 20 meters long (and remember, my American readers, that meters are a bigger unit than feet, so this is a difference of 49 feet versus 70 feet!) It went through some awkward nomenclature situations - the original name was thought to belong to a fish, but it didn’t, and so it was renamed the name you see here, and that was used in the literature, but then they found that the original name was fine after all, and it was just a mess, because the replacement name was used in literature, and eventually the taxonomy guys was just like “okay keep the second name instead,” and so that’s why it’s Haplocanthosaurus.  It’s phylogenetic position was kind of uncertain in the Neosauropods until the 2015 Tschopp et al. analysis, where it was found to be the basalmost Diplodocoid.

Sources: 

http://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com/species/h/haplocanthosaurus.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplocanthosaurus

“Arranging leg bones of Haplocanthosaurus, Vertebrate Paleontology Lab,”

Alex J. Rota