Pronunciation: see-loo-ROY-deez
Meaning: Coelurus-like
Author/s: von Huene and Matley (1933)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Madhya Pradesh, India
Discovery Chart Position: #167
Coeluroides largus
Coeluroides belongs to the notoriously fragmentary theropod assemblage from the Late Cretaceous of Madhya Pradesh on Bara Simla Hill—a fauna reconstructed more from absence than it is from fossils. When Friedrich von Huene and Charles Matley published their sweeping 1933 monograph, they named nine new theropod species from the latter's extensive "Carnosaur Bed" collection, seven of which were based solely on vertebrae. Coeluroides emerged from this ambitious taxonomic moment, its identity anchored in just three caudal vertebrae recovered from the Lameta Formation, a Maastrichtian-age unit preserving the final pre-eruption ecosystems of the Indian subcontinent, shortly before the earliest Deccan Trap flows buried the landscape. These isolated tail bones are enough to place the animal among small-bodied theropods, likely within the broader ceratosaur–abelisauroid radiation that dominated Gondwanan predator guilds, but they reveal little about its anatomy beyond general proportions, and even that is a stretch.
(Large Coelurus-like one)Etymology
Coeluroides is derived from "Coelurus" (hollow tail) and "-oides" (like), for the presumed similarity of its vertebrae to those of a dinosaur called Coelurus.
The species epithet, largus, can mean "large" or "plentiful" in Latin. Based, as it is, on just three vertebrae, we can only assume that Von Huene and Matley were referring to their size, but they aren't particularly large either.
Discovery
The remains of Coeluroides were discovered in the "Carnosaur Bed" of the Lameta Formation on Bara Simla Hill, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India, by Charles Matley in 1917.
The holotype (GSI K27/562, K27/574 and K27/595) is three tail vertebrae that were erroneously described as back vertebrae by Huene and Matley in 1933.
