CATHARTESAURA

Cathartesaura is known only from a few parts, and few of those have been described, but scientists have deduced that it belonged to a group of hoover-mouthed diplodocoid sauropods known a rebbachisaurids. Speculation is rife that they may have had "lazy" necks thanks to copious ammounts of movement-restricting muscle attached to long, flared-out spines on their neck vertebrae. The name is lazy too. Lazy or very clever.

Circumnavigating the fact that "Cathartes aura" (note the space) had already been assigned to a bald, red-headed New World Turkey Vulture by Carl Linnaeus way back in 1758, Pablo Gallina and colleagues disposed of said space and came up with a name that neatly combined its place of discovery — the Spanish name for Cathartes aura is "buitre" which is where the turkey vulture nesting site "La Buitrera" got its name, with saura — feminine declension of the ever popular Greek suffix sauros which means "lizard". Good fortune or good judgement we'll never know, but the name stuck, which came as a great relief to Anaerrobicos S.A., the Argentinian glue company who sponsored the dig.

The discovery of Cathartesaura and other rebbachisaurids in Pategonian formations that are roughly 99-93 million years old makes them the latest living diplodocoids known from anywhere. Their sudden disappearance has led some palaeontologists to speculate that Mother Nature practiced for the great K-Pg event by holding a turn of the late-Cretaceous mini extinction that literally stopped the diplodocoids and diplodocoid-eating carcharodontosaurids dead in their tracks and cleared a path for titanosaurs to diversify and rush into the vacant "huge plant muncher" eco-niche. Okay, given their size and weight, perhaps "rush" isn't the right word.