Pronunciation: may-RO kuh-TAY-noss
Meaning: Thigh beast
Author/s: Peyre de Fabrègues and Allain (2016)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Mafeteng, Lesotho
Discovery Chart Position: #920
Meroktenos thabanensis
Of the forty officially-named non-sauropod sauropodomorph dinosaurs known worldwide, ten of them (Aardonyx, Antetonitrus, Arcusaurus, Blikanasaurus, Eucnemesaurus, Euskelosaurus, Massospondylus, Melanorosaurus, Plateosauravus and Sefapanosaurus) hail from South Africa, and two of those (Massospondylus and Melanorosaurus) are also from the Kingdom of Lesotho. One of the latter pair was long-thought by some authors to be the only basal sauropodomorph genus found in both Triassic and Jurassic-aged Formations in Southern Africa, and it isn't Massospondylus. It isn't Melanorosaurus either. Not any more.
The remains that would become Meroktenos were initially illustrated and briefly described in 1962 by Costedoat who referred them to Gryponyx, though she wasn't entirely convinced this is where they belonged. The same material was described by Françoise-Xavier Gauffre both preliminarily (when he assigned it to Melanorosaurus as Melanorosaurus thabanensis) in 1993 and then fully (when he erroneously synonymized it with the never-formally-named and anatomically different "Kholumolumosaurus ellenbergerorum" aka "The Maphutseng Dinosaur") in his PhD thesis in 1996. Melanorosaurus was already a complete mess by this point, having been lumbered with fossils from all over southern Africa for seven decades, often with the same catalogue numbers, and palaeontologist's understanding of the taxon was based on these haphazardly referred remains rather than on Haughton's original type specimen. However, we were fourteen years into the 21st century before Nair and Yates dared to say as much, and a further two years had passed before Claire Peyre de Fabrègues and Ronan Allain plucked Meroktenos from the carnage, having embarked on the first official Melanorosaurus clean up job. It won't be the last.
Meroktenos is currently the only confirmed Triassic "prosauropod" to sport a sauropod-like femur, albeit a small and stocky one, hinting that it was on the road to a quadrupedal gait long before sauropods ate themselves to such a size that they required four legs to carry them. That said, based on their proportions and their size compared to the thigh, the arms of Meroktenos seem ill-equipped for weight-bearing, thus it was most probably still bipedal: it moved on two legs. Camelotia has similarly straight and strong thighs, but it was recently shunted from Prosauropoda into Sauropoda proper, and seems betwixt and between, features-wise.
The remains that would become Meroktenos were initially illustrated and briefly described in 1962 by Costedoat who referred them to Gryponyx, though she wasn't entirely convinced this is where they belonged. The same material was described by Françoise-Xavier Gauffre both preliminarily (when he assigned it to Melanorosaurus as Melanorosaurus thabanensis) in 1993 and then fully (when he erroneously synonymized it with the never-formally-named and anatomically different "Kholumolumosaurus ellenbergerorum" aka "The Maphutseng Dinosaur") in his PhD thesis in 1996. Melanorosaurus was already a complete mess by this point, having been lumbered with fossils from all over southern Africa for seven decades, often with the same catalogue numbers, and palaeontologist's understanding of the taxon was based on these haphazardly referred remains rather than on Haughton's original type specimen. However, we were fourteen years into the 21st century before Nair and Yates dared to say as much, and a further two years had passed before Claire Peyre de Fabrègues and Ronan Allain plucked Meroktenos from the carnage, having embarked on the first official Melanorosaurus clean up job. It won't be the last.
Meroktenos is currently the only confirmed Triassic "prosauropod" to sport a sauropod-like femur, albeit a small and stocky one, hinting that it was on the road to a quadrupedal gait long before sauropods ate themselves to such a size that they required four legs to carry them. That said, based on their proportions and their size compared to the thigh, the arms of Meroktenos seem ill-equipped for weight-bearing, thus it was most probably still bipedal: it moved on two legs. Camelotia has similarly straight and strong thighs, but it was recently shunted from Prosauropoda into Sauropoda proper, and seems betwixt and between, features-wise.
(Thigh beast from Thabana)Etymology
Meroktenos is derived from the ancient Greek "meros" (femur) and "ktênos" (beast) because the species was first described based only on its femur.
The species epithet, thabanensis, means "from Thabana" in Latin.
Discovery
The first remains of Meroktenos were discovered in the Lower Elliot Formation, Mafeteng district, Lesotho, during a field trip carried out by Paul and François Ellenberger, J. Fabre and L. Ginsburg, in 1959. Although Gauffre mentioned a locality "4-5 km south of Thabana Morena village" in 1993, the exact location of the quarry is unknown, but he erroneously assumed it lay in the Early Jurassic Upper Elliot Formation, which would have made Meroktenos 20 million years younger than Melanorosaurus to which it was initially assigned, as Melanorosaurus thabanensis.
The holotype (MNHN.F.LES16, initially MNHN.F.LES16c) includes the thigh (480 mm long) that was initially named Melanorosaurus thabatensis along with an incomplete right ilium (MNHN.F.LES16a), a left pubis (MNHN.F.LES16b), and a right metatarsal II (MNHN.F.LES16d). A further three specimens found in the collections of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris (a cervical vertebra, a left ulna and a left radius) were apparently found associated with the holotype at the Thabana Morena locality. However, they were assigned completely different field codes (MNHN.F.LES351a, MNHN.F.LES351b and MNHN.F.LES351c respectively) and no-one knows why. Given this uncertainty, they are only tentatively assigned to Meroktenos.
