CHINSHAKIANGOSAURUS

Although Chinshakiangosaurus is known from a large chunk of skeleton, most of it is locked away in storage and unavailable for study but it still managed to get itself named twice by two different authors before it was even added to the roll call of dinosaurs. Ye named it Chinshakiangosaurus chonghoensis in 1975^|1| and Zhou Chinshakiangosaurus zhonghoensis a decade later^|2|, but we had to wait a further seven years for an official description of the now-named Chinshakiangosaurus chunghoensis by Dong Zhiming which, although brief, was enough to haul it from the realms of "nomen nudum"^|3|.

All we know of Chinshakiangosaurus we know from some vertebrae, leg bones, shoulder blades and a partial pelvis, plus a lower jaw which sports a unique combination of sauropod and non-sauropod sauropodamorph features. Like sauropods proper, its lower jaw is a broad "U-shape" when viewed from above (or below), it has a bony brace around the outer-edge of its teeth that reinforced the base of its crowns, and the teeth themselves have wrinkled enamel. But like most prosauropods, its teeth are peppermint-leaf-shaped and its lower jaw sports a ridge that probably anchored cheeks.

Based on the available remains, latest research recovered Chinshakiangosaurus as the most basalmost of the basal sauropods in which case cheeks would be big news. All other sauropods either lost them or never had them in the first place, which allowed a wider gape to gorge on the huge quantities of foliage required to fuel their collosal bodies. The flipside being; without cheeks you can't chew, so they swallowed gastroliths to process plant matter in their gut.