Pronunciation: al-GO-uh-SOR-us
Meaning: Algoa Bay Lizard
Author/s: Robert Broom (1904)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Algoa Bay, South Africa
Discovery Chart Position: #88
Algoasaurus bauri
Algoasaurus is known only from very fragmentary remains discovered in the Upper Kirkwood Formation of Cape Province, South Africa. But it could have been so very different. Quarry workers failed to recognize a nine-meter-long skeleton as 136 million-year-old ultra-rare fossilized remains, and as they carried on pummeling it to make house bricks, one of South Africa's very first sauropod discoveries was lost. Ignorance is bliss.
Fortunately, a few scraps were salvaged, but not enough to classify it with any certainty. By various experts at various times, Algoasaurus has been considered a macronarian, a diplodocoid, a titanosaurian, a titanosaurid, a camarasaurid and a rebbachisaurid. But given its sparse remains, which were nowhere to be found during the most recent attempt to refine their affinities, even Eusauropoda incertae sedis — a true sauropod of uncertain placement — is a bit optimistic.
Fortunately, a few scraps were salvaged, but not enough to classify it with any certainty. By various experts at various times, Algoasaurus has been considered a macronarian, a diplodocoid, a titanosaurian, a titanosaurid, a camarasaurid and a rebbachisaurid. But given its sparse remains, which were nowhere to be found during the most recent attempt to refine their affinities, even Eusauropoda incertae sedis — a true sauropod of uncertain placement — is a bit optimistic.
(Baur's Algoa Lizard)Etymology
Algoasaurus is derived from "Algoa" (for Algoa Bay, near the place of its discovery) and the Greek "sauros" (lizard).
The species epithet, bauri, honours vertebrate morphologist and turtle expert Georg Hermann Carl Lugwig Baur.
Discovery
All known fossils of Algoasaurus were discovered in the Upper Kirkwood Formation (Uitenhage Group) in "clayey rock" at the Port Elizabeth Brick and Tile Company quarry, Despatch Town, southeast of Uitenhage, near Algoa Bay, Cape Province, South Africa, in 1903.
The Holotype (unknown catalogue number) includes a thighbone that's missing both ends ("estimated to have been 500mm in length" when complete), a toe bone, a partial shoulder blade (that "resembles considerably the scapula of Brontosaurus, though of very much smaller size"), "portions of many ribs", and fragments of vertebrae from the neck, back and tail (with "considerable resemblance to those of Diplodocus"), which were all rumoured to have been lost. However, a toe bone (AMNH 5631) that was part of the holotype made it's way to the American Museum of Natural History when they aquired Broom's collection in 1913, but seemingly the rest didn't go with it.
A tail vertebrae (SAM-PK-K1500) located within the collections of the Iziko Museum, Cape
Town, might be another of the missing fossils.
