"Newtonsaurus" is the informal name given to an as yet undescribed genus of dinosaur from the Late Triassic. It was probably a ceratosaur, which lived in what is now the United Kingdom. The type species is "N. cambrensis", originally coined as Zanclodon cambrensis.
Description[]
The holotype was collected in 1898 and it still exists today, but back to the history of "Newtonsaurus". Newtonsaurus was described in 1899 as Zanclodon cambrensis, but when scientists found out that Zanclodon was actually an archosauriform and not a dinosaur, they decided to scrap the name and leave the fossil unnamed. The dentary was renamed to Megalosaurus cambrensis in 1908. It stayed thay way until Ralph Molnar and his team created the informal genus name "Newtonsaurus" in 1990 within the 1st Edition of his book The Dinosauria. No palaeontologist has dared to use this name since 1999, when Welles vide Welles and Pickering used the name informally during their large publication. [1]
Reference[]
- ↑ Newton, E.T. (1899). On a megalosaurid jaw from Rhaetic beds near Bridgend (Glamorganshire). Quartely Journal of the Geological Society of London 55:89-96.