GIGANTOSAURUS

Not to be confused with Giganotosaurus (though it often is), Gigantosaurus is held together with dust and optimism, which comes as no great surprise, given its Victorian-era origins. It's not the worst represented English sauropod, as it has laid claim to a couple of tail vertebrae, a partial shin, an armour plate and casts of a lower arm bone and a name-prompting claw that "might pertain to one animal". But they were scattered across Cambridgeshire, discovered mostly by different people, at different sites, at different times, and occasionally found simply loitering in or above cabinets at the Woodwardian Museum with no hint of provenance. Richard Lydekker tentatively reassigned Gigantosaurus to Ornithopsis humerocristatus in 1888, piecemeal, and just as tentatively moved the latter to Pelorosaurus in 1890. Yet despite all that, it somehow managed to ignite a full?blown palaeontological civil war in Germany.

In 1907, German palaeontologist Eberhard Fraas discovered two sauropods at “Quarry A” and “Quarry B” of the Tendaguru Beds in what is now Tanzania, and named them Gigantosaurus africanus and Gigantosaurus robustus, on the assumption that they were closely related. Fraas was well aware that Harry Seeley had already used Gigantosaurus for the fragmentary English material but thought it (1) had not been sufficiently described in the first place, and (2) had been officially sunk as a synonym of Ornithopsis by Lydekker, making the name available. Richard Sternfeld was having none of that, and rattled his countrymen in 1911 when proposing Tornieria with amended epithets—thus Tornieria africana and Tornieria robusta—as replacements for the African species without consulting an ailing Fraas first, and in doing so, he triggered a century-long naming-and-renaming extravaganza.

A fuming Werner Janensch flatly refused to entertain Tornieria robusta, and continued to use Gigantosaurus robustus for the rest of his career, lamenting the confusion caused by applying new names to existing dinosaurs—even as he reassigned Gigantosaurus africanus to Barosaurus in 1922. Kristian Remes returned the latter to Tornieria africana in 2006, along with a thorough redescription of the 30% of its remains that hadn’t been obliterated by WWII bombing raids, but minus a pair of tail vertebrae that he renamed Australodocus in 2007.

Meanwhile, Gigantosaurus robustus continued its own odyssey. Haughton erroneously shifted it to Barosaurus robustus in 1928, and in the same breath named Gigantosaurus dixeyi from Malawi, which became the titanosaur Malawisaurus, courtesy of Jacobs, Winkler, Downs and Gomani in 1993. Gigantosaurus robustus turned out to be a titanosaur too, and as the flag-bearing Tornieria africana is a diplodocid, it needed yet another new name. In a final twist of irony, the species that Janensch refused to acknowledge was named Janenschia in 1991 by Rupert Wild in his honour, though a tail he had assigned to Gigantosaurus robustus himself in 1929 was removed and renamed Wamweracaudia by Mannion and colleagues in 2019.