HUALLASAURUS
a kritosaurinin hadrosaurid (duck-billed) dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Argentina.
Pronunciation: WAH-ya-SOR-us
Meaning: Duck lizard
Author/s: Rozadilla
et al. (
2022)
Synonyms: See
below
First Discovery: Río Negro, Argentina
Acta Ordinal: #1089
Huallasaurus australis
(Southern Duck Lizard)Etymology
Huallasaurus is derived from the Mapudungun "hualla" (duck) and the the Greek "sauros" (lizard).
The
species epithet,
australis, means "southern" in Latin, referring to its discovery in southern Argentina. Mapudungun is a language spoken by the Mapuche people of south-central Chile and west-central Argentina.
Zoobank registry:
urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:73D152DC-C8A1-4099-8A80-8288B4C00934.
Kritosaurus australis (Bonaparte
et al., 1984)
Secernosaurus australis (Wagner, 2001)
Scernosaurus koerneri (Prieto Márquez and Salinas, 2010)
Discovery
The remains of
Huallasaurus were discovered in the Middle Member of the Los Alamitos Formation at Arroyo Verde, southeastern Río Negro Province, Argentina, by Jose Bonaparte and Jaime Powell in 1982-83.
The
holotype (MACN-PV 2, *previously MACN-RN 2—the type of
Kritosaurus
australis) includes parts of the skull, the right shoulder girdle, both breastplates, a virtually complete pelvic girdle, a partial sacrum of four fused hip vertebrae plus additional sacral vertebrae and ribs, several tail vertebrae, and a left thigh along with the upper half of a right thigh.
Paratypes include MACN-PV 142 (a collection of skull and jaw fragments, plus a shoulder blade),
MACN-PV 143 (braincase fragments), MACN-PV 144 (part of the skull roof and braincase), MACN-PV 145 (a lower arm, the lower part of a thigh, two metatarsals, and several back vertebrae), MACN-PV 146 (a right shoulder blade and hip fragments), MACN-PV 826 (shoulder and hip bones, and several neck and back vertebrae), MACN-PV 987 (an articulated series of vertebrae from the end of the tail), MACN-PV 990 (the first bone of the third toe), MACN-PV 991 (a skull and lower jaw fragment), MACN-PV 997 (a right shin bone), and MACN-PV 998 (a right lower jaw, heavily reconstructed with plaster).
* MACN-RN was the original regional prefix applied to all material deposited at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales (MACN) from
Río
Negro, but that was replaced with MACN-PV—in reference to the Colección Nacional de
Paleo
Vertebrados—in 2002, per
Disposición Nº07/2002, when the MACN formally standardized their collection names and acronyms.
Estimations
Timeline:
Era: Mesozoic
Epoch: Late Cretaceous
Stage: Campanian-Maastrichtian
Age range: 83-66 mya
Stats:
Est. max. length: 9 meters
Est. max. hip height: ?
Est. max. weight: ?
Diet: Herbivore
References
• Bonaparte JF, Franchi MR, Powell JE and Sepulveda EG (1984) "La Formación Los Alamitos (Campaniano-Maastrichtiano) del sudeste de Rio Negro, con descripcion de
Kritosaurus australis n. sp. (Hadrosauridae). Significado paleogeografico de los vertebrados".
Revista de la Asociación Geológica Argentina, 39 (3-4): 284-299. [names Kritosaurus australis.]
• Wagner JR (2001) "The hadrosaurian dinosaurs (Ornithischia:
Hadrosauria) of Big Bend National Park, Brewster County, Texas,
with implications for Late Cretaceous Paleozoogeography".
M.S. thesis. Texas Tech University, Austin, Texas. [Kritisaurus australis = Secernosaurus australis.]
• Tablado A (2002) "
Las colecciones del Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales "Bernardino Rivadavia"".
Revista del Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales, 4(2): 225-226.
• Prieto-Marquez A and Salinas GC (2010) "
A re-evaluation of Secernosaurus koerneri and Kritosaurus australis (Dinosauria, Hadrosauridae) from the Late Cretaceous of Argentina".
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30(3): 813-837. DOI: 10.1080/02724631003763508. [Kritosaurus australis + Secernosaurus australis = Secernosaurus koerneri.]
• Juárez Valieri RD, Haro JA, Fiorelli LE and Calvo JO (2010) "A new hadrosauroid (Dinosauria: Ornithopoda) from the Allen Formation (Late Cretaceous) of Patagonia, Argentina".
Revista del Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales, New Series, 12(2): 217-231. DOI: 10.22179/REVMACN.12.242. [names Willinakaqe salitralensis.]
• Coria RA, González Riga BJ, and Casadío S (2012) "
A new Hadrosaurid (Dinosauria, ornithopoda) from Allen Formation, La Pampa, Argentina".
Ameghiniana, 49(4): 552-572. [names Lapampasaurus cholinoi.]
• Penélope Cruzado Caballero P and Coria RA (2016) "Revisiting the hadrosaurid diversity of the Allen Formation: Re-evaluation of the taxonomic validity of
Willinakaqe salitralensis (Ornithopoda, Hadrosauridae) from Salitral Moreno, Río Negro Province, Argentina".
Ameghiniana, 53(2): 231-237. DOI: 10.5710/AMGH.25.09.2015.2943.
• Cruzado-Caballero P and Powell J (2017)
"
Bonapartesaurus rionegrensis, a new hadrosaurine dinosaur from South America: implications for phylogenetic and biogeographic relations with North America".
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 37(2): e1289381. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2017.1289381. [names Bonapartesaurus rionegrensis.]
• Rozadilla S, Brissón-Egli F, Agnolín L, Aranciaga-Rolando F, Mauro A and Novas FE (2022) "
A new hadrosaurid (Dinosauria: Ornithischia) from the Late Cretaceous of northern Patagonia and the radiation of South American hadrosaurids".
Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 19(17): 1207-1235. DOI: 10.1080/14772019.2021.2020917.
• Alarcón-Muñoz J, Vargas AO, Püschel HP, Soto-Acuña S, Manríquez L, Leppe M, Kaluza J, Milla V, Gutstein CS, Palma-Liberona J, Stinnesbeck W, Frey E, Pino JP, Bajor D, Núñez E, Ortiz H, Rubilar-Rogers D and Cruzado-Caballero P (2023) "
Relict duck-billed dinosaurs survived into the last age of the dinosaurs in subantarctic Chile".
Science Advances, 9(24): eadg2456. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg2456.
• Aureliano T, Ghilardi AM, Kaluza J and Martinelli AG (2026) "Inside a duck-billed dinosaur: Vertebral bone microstructure of
Huallasaurus (Hadrosauridae), Upper Cretaceous of Patagonia".
The Anatomical Record, 309(7): 1702–1712. DOI: 10.1002/ar.70040.
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HUALLASAURUS :: from DinoChecker's dinosaur archive".
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