MALAWISAURUS

Malawisaurus is a short-faced, armoured titanosaur, possibly a specialist nemegtosaurid titanosaur or close relative of the lognkosaurs, and hails from Malawi's Early Cretaceous Dinosaur Beds Formation. Although Titanosauria ("giant lizards" in Greek) houses some of the largest critters that have ever walked the earth, the shy-of-sixteen-meter-long Malawisaurus isn't one of them. Plus, it hasn't always been called Malawisaurus.

Five years after their 1923 discovery, the fossils that would become Malawisaurus were named Gigantosaurus dixeyi by Sidney Hughton, who correctly identified some features in common with a sauropod from Tanzania's Tendaguru beds that Eberhard Fraas had previously named Gigantosaurus robustus in 1908. Unfortunately, Seeley had already named an English sauropod Gigantosaurus megalonyx in 1869, so the Tendaguru form was renamed Tornieria by Richard Sternfeld in 1911, and Gigantosaurus dixeyi became Tornieria dixeyi by default. Even more unfortunate is that the Tornieria name-bearer is actually Torniera africanus: a diplodocid that was assigned to North America's Barosaurus, and Tornieria robustus: a titanosaurid, was not only from a different family but also a subordinate species and unqualified to anchor the now-anchorless genus. Despite Haughton's misguided insistence on referring to it as Barosaurus robustus, the latter was renamed Janenschia by Rupert Wild in 1991, while Tornieria dixeyi became Malawisaurus courtesy of Jacobs, Winkler, Downs and Gomani in 1993. Funnily enough, Tornieria africanus has since been reinstated as a valid critter, albeit with an amended epithet of africana and light a pair of vertebrae that became Australodocus, but none of that affects the status of Malawisaurus, which is very much its own dinosaur.