Pronunciation: loh-REEN-yah-SOR-us
Meaning: Lourinha lizard
Author/s: Dantas et al. (1998)
Synonyms: See below
First Discovery: Alenquer, Portugal
Discovery Chart Position: #429
Lourinhasaurus alenquerensis
Not to be confused with Lourinhanosaurus, a Portuguese dinosaur of the carnivorous variety, Lourinhasaurus is a sauropod and an "astonishingly massive" one of the "Brontosaurus type", according to earliest accounts. Unfortunately, its remains lack hands, head and feet, and the authors forgot to specify a holotype from the available remains, which, when combined, led to almost a century's worth of classification issues.
Lapperent and Zbyszewski initially assigned the specimen that would eventually become Lourinhasaurus to Apatosaurus as Apatosaurus alenquerensis in 1957, McIntosh suggested its affinities lay with Camarasaurus in 1990, and Steel referred it to Atlantosaurus somewhere in between. On top of Brachiosaurus, any of those assignments would have doubled the number of sauropod genera known from both North America and Portugal at that time. But, alas, it just wasn't meant to be.
Dantas severed its ties with Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus and Atlantosaurus when he coined Lourinhasaurus in 1998, then shortly after, Antunes and Mateus moved Brachiosaurus atalaiensis to Lusotitan, which left Portugal and North America with zero sauropods in common. However, they do both boast closely related critters of the same sauropod families in brachiosaurids and also camarasaurids (since Mocho confirmed Lourinhasaurus as Europe's first member of Camarasauridae in 2014), as well as stegosaurids and their own species of the theropod Torvosaurus. So, the Late Jurassic ecosystems of Portugal and North America (and perhaps Africa) were actually very similar.
Lapperent and Zbyszewski initially assigned the specimen that would eventually become Lourinhasaurus to Apatosaurus as Apatosaurus alenquerensis in 1957, McIntosh suggested its affinities lay with Camarasaurus in 1990, and Steel referred it to Atlantosaurus somewhere in between. On top of Brachiosaurus, any of those assignments would have doubled the number of sauropod genera known from both North America and Portugal at that time. But, alas, it just wasn't meant to be.
Dantas severed its ties with Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus and Atlantosaurus when he coined Lourinhasaurus in 1998, then shortly after, Antunes and Mateus moved Brachiosaurus atalaiensis to Lusotitan, which left Portugal and North America with zero sauropods in common. However, they do both boast closely related critters of the same sauropod families in brachiosaurids and also camarasaurids (since Mocho confirmed Lourinhasaurus as Europe's first member of Camarasauridae in 2014), as well as stegosaurids and their own species of the theropod Torvosaurus. So, the Late Jurassic ecosystems of Portugal and North America (and perhaps Africa) were actually very similar.
(Lourinhã lizard from Alenquer)Etymology
Lourinhasaurus is derived from "Lourhina" (an area in the Lisbon District of west-central Portugal rich in remains of sauropod
dinosaurs) and the Greek "sauros" (lizard).
The species epithet, alenquerensis (ah-LENG-ke-REN-sis), is derived from "Alenquer" (the region of Portugal where the first specimen was found) and the Latin "ensis" (from). Apatosaurus alenquerensis (Lapparent and Zbyszewski, 1957),
Atlantosaurus alenquerensis (Steel, 1970),
Brontosaurus alenquerensis (Olshevsky, 1978),
Camarasaurus alenquerensis (McIntosh, 1990).
Discovery
The first remains of Lourinhasaurus were found at "Moinho do Carmo" (a site discovered by Harold Weston Robbins) in the Sobral Formation, Alenquer, Lisboa, Portugal, in 1949.A holotype was never formally established, but Miguel Antunes and Octávio Mateus chose the "Moinho do Carmo" specimen — catalogued as MIGM 4956-7, 4970, 4975, 4979-80, 4983-4 and 5780-1, which includes several neck, back, hip and tail vertebrae, neck and back ribs, both shoulder girdles, a complete hip (ilium, pubis and ischium), and an arm and a leg (but no hands or feet) from a single individual — as the lectotype in 2003. A shed full of other specimens from across Portugal have been assigned to Lourinhasaurus in its guise as Apatosaurus, including a tooth from Ourém that Henri-Émile Sauvage originally assigned to Morosaurus marchei in 1897, plus a series of 16 tail vertebrae found at Praia de São Bernardino in February of 1946 by H. da Costa Cabaço that's in limbo because the type specimen lacks the appropriate parts for comparison. Albert F. De Lapparent assigned a partial skeleton with 100 gastroliths found by Mr Carlos Anunciação in 1983 at Porto Dinheiro here too. But Bonaparte and Mateus renamed the latter Dinheirosaurus in 1999.
