Pronunciation: AHR-kuh-RAH-vee-uh
Meaning: Arkhara Road
Author/s: Alifanov and Bolotsky (2010)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Amur, Russia
Discovery Chart Position: #692
Arkharavia heterocoelica
To say Arkharavia is known for modest remains would be extremely generous. Five partial caudals (tail bones) discovered at different levels of a bonebed in Russia's Amur Region, plus a tooth fragment found on the outskirts of Blagoveshchensk in 1986, is what this "new for 2010" dinosaur hinges on and, based on these fossils, the name-coining authors thought it was a primitive titanosaurian which may have resembled Argentina's Chubutisaurus insignis.
However, basing new dinosaurs on such poor remains can often lead to embarrassment. And there's not much more embarrassing than having an associate point out that the holotype fossil you singled out as the property of a sauropod (in this case, a vertebra) most likely belongs to a completely different type of herbivorous dinosaur called a hadrosaur. The other four tail bones are just as un sauropody. But the tooth fragment seems legit.
Arkharavia is notable for having heterocoelous centra (saddle-shaped surfaces of adjoining vertebrae), which is a feature also found in birds and turtles that affords great flexibility to a horizontal spinal column. We humans, on the other hand, have acoelous centra (flat surfaces of adjoining vertebrae), which are ideal for supporting and distributing compressive forces on our vertical spinal column.
However, basing new dinosaurs on such poor remains can often lead to embarrassment. And there's not much more embarrassing than having an associate point out that the holotype fossil you singled out as the property of a sauropod (in this case, a vertebra) most likely belongs to a completely different type of herbivorous dinosaur called a hadrosaur. The other four tail bones are just as un sauropody. But the tooth fragment seems legit.
Arkharavia is notable for having heterocoelous centra (saddle-shaped surfaces of adjoining vertebrae), which is a feature also found in birds and turtles that affords great flexibility to a horizontal spinal column. We humans, on the other hand, have acoelous centra (flat surfaces of adjoining vertebrae), which are ideal for supporting and distributing compressive forces on our vertical spinal column.
Etymology
Arkharavia takes its name from the village of Arkhara (population around 10,000) and "via" which means "road" in Latin. We can only assume this has something to do with its place of discovery, as Alifanov's paper is a little vague.
The species epithet, heterocoelica, is a reference to the above mentioned heterocoelous... ness.
Discovery
The remains of Arkharavia were mostly discovered from 2000 to 2004 by employees of the Amur Institute of Integrated
Research of the Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Amur KNII) with
assistance from the Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) and Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (Brussels), in the Udurchukan Formation at the Kundur Locality, Arkhara Village, Amur region of Russia. This region is a bit of a hotspot for herbivorous dinosaurs, having also yielded fossils of the lambeosaurines (hollow-crested duckbills) Amurosaurus, Olorotitan and Charonosaurus, and the saurolophines (flat-headed duckbills) Kerberosaurus, Wulagasaurus and Kundurosaurus.
The Holotype (AEIM no. 2/418, housed at the Amur Natural History Museum) is a tail vertebra. Four other tail vertebrae (AEIM nos. 2/419, 2/420, 2/720 and 2/997), found at different levels of the same bonebed, were also assigned to Arkharavia, along with a tooth fragment (AEIM no. 1/316) found by employees of the Amur KNII on the outskirts of Blagoveshchensk City in 1986. The latter was originally referred to as Titanosauridae indet. by Moiseenko et al. in 1997.
