| Neosodon | |
|---|---|
| |
| Known teeth | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Sauropsida |
| Superorder: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | Saurischia |
| Suborder: | †Sauropodomorpha |
| Infraorder: | †Sauropoda |
| Clade: | †Turiasauria? |
| Genus: | †Neosodon Moussaye, 1885 |
| Binomial name | |
| †Neosodon praecursor Buffetaut & Martin, 1993 (informal) | |
| Synonyms | |
| |
Neosodon (meaning "new tooth") was a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Late Tithonian-age Upper Jurassic Sables et Gres a Trigonia gibbosa of Départment du Pas-de-Calais, France. It has never been formally given a species name, but is often seen as N. praecursor, which actually comes from a different animal. Often in the past, it had been assigned to the wastebasket taxon Pelorosaurus, but restudy has suggested that it could be related to Turiasaurus, a roughly-contemporaneous giant Spanish sauropod.
History[]
M. Moussaye named the species Neosodon in 1885 on the basis of a single, broken tooth discovered in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, of which he thought belonged to a theropod that was similar to Megalosaurus. He neglected his chance to give the genus a species name. In 1888, Henri Émile Sauvage synonymized Neosodon with Iguanodon praecursor, which had already been mixed up and confused with the American sauropod Caulodon, named by Edward Drinker Cope in 1877. Since Iguanodon praecursor and Neosodon do not have the same type specimen, and do not come from the same aged rocks, Alfred Romer (1956) and R. Steel (1970) moved both I. praecursor and Neosodon to the valid brachiosaur Pelorosaurus, which is a "wastebasket taxon". I. praecursor actually comes from the same unnamed Kimmeridgian-aged formation as the sauropod Morinosaurus.
Restoration
Around 1990, French palaeontologists reported on the bones of a camarasaurid sauropod that were discovered within the Sables et Gres a Trigonia gibbosa, which was the type locality of the Neosodon. In 1993, Éric Buffetaut and M. Martin suggested that the camarasaur bones belonged to Neosodon praecursor (this was the first time that the epithet praecursor was used for Neosodon, but it was used informally and was never published), but Jean Le Louff, and his team, rejected this in 1996. He said that "Neosodon is based only on a tooth, which did not overlap the new material." In 2004, within the publication of The Dinosauria (2nd edition), Paul Dodson, Halszka Osmólska and David Weishampel classed both Neosodon and Iguanodon praecursor as basal sauropods and defined Iguanodon praecursor as an indeterminate sauropod that is too fragmentary to lassify to the genus level. In 2006, Rafael Royo-Torres and his team described the new genus Turiasaurus. Within that publication, they placed Neosodon within the Turiasauridae, a new family created in the publication. They noted that the teeth of Neosodon were similar to the teeth of Turiasaurus - not similar enough to synonymise the two.
Size[]
Since 1885, around five more teeth, which are all broken, belonging to Neosodon have been unearthed in France. These teeth are around 60 cm (2.36 inches) tall and would have been 80 cm (3.15 inches) tall if they were complete upon discovery. The entire animal would have been around 20-25 meters (65-82 ft) long when fully grown. Neosodon would have weighed around 30 tons (27 tonnes) in weight. Its skull therefore would have been around 50-70 cm (20-27 inches) long. (estimates based off Turiasaurus)
Gallery[]
Neosodon/Gallery
