MOCHLODON
a plant-eating rhabdodontid ornithischian dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Europe.
Pronunciation: MOK-lo-don
Meaning: Bar tooth
Author/s: Seeley (
1881)
Synonyms: Iguanodon suessi
First Discovery: Niederosterreich, Austria
Discovery Chart Position: #58
Mochlodon suessi
Following the discovery of a single tooth at the Konstantin coal mine in 1859, Professors Ferdinand Stoliczka and Edward Suess went through the Gosau Beds of the Grünbach Formation, close to Muthmannsdorf, Austria, with a fine-toothed comb. They discovered all manner of fossilized vertebrates, and in 1871 Emanuel Bunzel plucked PIUW 2349/2, an ornithopod jaw and vertebra (now lost) and named
Iguanodon suessi, honoring Suess, and it's been changing names ever since.
Harry Seeley coined
Mochlodon suessii for these fossils in 1881, mainly because they were nothing like those of
Iguanodon, but it was later assigned to
Rhabdodon as
Rhabdodon suessi by Nopcsa (1900) and to
Zalmoxes as a
Zalmoxes sp. by Sven Sachs and Jahn J. Hornung (2006). In a nutshell, this Austrian misfit has been lumped with every European member of Rhabdodontidae over the course of 135 years, and at least 50% of palaeontologists still aren't convinced that it's a valid dinosaur.
Dave Weishampel is one of many who have tagged it a nomen dubium: a dubious critter, almost worthless to science. Then he, along with Attila Ösi, Edina Prondvai and Richard Butler, resurrected the name in 2012 having stumbled upon derived traits that everyone else, including himself, had previously missed, and bolstered the genus with a second species from Hungary (See
Mochlodon verosi).
(Suess' Bar tooth)Etymology
Mochlodon is derived from Greek "mokhlos" (bar, lever) and "odon" (tooth), because of the ridges on its teeth.
The
species epithet,
suessi, honors geologist Eduard Suess.
ZooBank registry:
urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:49659CC4-EB7E-47EC-AAE5-8D462A729B8E.
Discovery
The remains of
Mochlodon suessi were discovered in the Grünbach Formation at Gosau, Niederosterreich, Austria, in 1859. The
holotype is PIUW 2349.
Estimations
Timeline:
Era: Mesozoic
Epoch: Late Cretaceous
Stage: Santonian
Age range: 84-80 mya
Stats:
Est. max. length: 4.5 meters
Est. max. hip height: ?
Est. max. weight: 180 Kg
Diet: Herbivore
Mochlodon vorosi
In 2012, Attila Osi, Edina Prondvai, Richard Butler and David Weishampel named an all new species of
Mochlodon—
Mochlodon
vorosi—which craftily side-stepped the above mentioned kerfuffle by being discovered in Hungary.
It was found between 2001 and 2011 at an open-pit bauxite mine in the Csehbánya Formation at Iharkút, which has also yielded every other Hungarian dinosaur, and bears a closer resemblance to the "Austrian
Mochlodon" than to any other rhabdodontid, according to the authors. The holotype (MTM V 2010.105.1) is a left upper jaw bone with four broken teeth, and the
species epithet,
verosi, honours Dr. Attila Vörös, palaeontologist and full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who founded the Paleontological Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Romanian Mochlodon
In 1899, Baron Nopcsa referred some Transylvanian fossil finds to
Mochlodon suessi and assigned others to the named-for-the-occasion
Mochlodon robustum. He later did a u-turn, moving the former to
Rhabdodon as
Rhabdodon suessi, and referred the remaining material to
Rhabdodon priscus. However, Weishampel
et al. assigned this Romanian material to a new genus—Zalmoxes—in 2005, having identified two species;
Zalmoxes robustus, which was previously known as
Mochlodon robustum, and
Zalmoxes shqiperorum, which they coined for the bits that were left.
References
• Bunzel E (January, 1870) "Notice of a Fragment of a Reptilian Skull from the Upper Cretaceous of Grunbach".
Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. 26: 394. DOI: 10.1144/GSL.JGS.1870.026.01-02.35.
• Bunzel E (1871) "Die Reptilfauna der Gosauformation in der Neuen Welt bei Wiener-Neustadt".
Abhandlungen der Kaiserlich-Königlichen Geologischen Reichsanstalt 5: 1-18.
• Seeley HG (February, 1881) "The Reptile Fauna of the Gosau Formation preserved in the Geological Museum of the University of Vienna: with a Note on the Geological Horizon of the Fossils at Neue Welt, west of Wiener Neustadt, by Edw. Suess, Ph.D., F.M.G.S., &c, Professor of Geology in the University of Vienna, &c".
Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. 37: 620-707. DOI: 10.1144/GSL.JGS.1881.037.01-04.49. [Note: the "&c" is not an error; it means "and so on, and so forth" and is a contraction of "etc." which is a contraction of "et cetera".]
• Nopcsa F (1900) "Dinosaurierreste aus Siebenbürgen (Schädel von
Limnosaurus transsylvanicus nov. gen. et spec.)".
Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Classe 68: 555-591.
• Sachs S and Hornung J (2006) "Juvenile ornithopod (Dinosauria: Rhabdodontidae) remains from the Upper Cretaceous (Lower Campanian, Gosau Group) of Muthmannsdorf (Lower Austria)".
Geobios, 39(3): 415-425. DOI: 10.1016/j.geobios.2005.01.003.
• Ösi A, Prondvai E, Butler R, Weishampel D B (2012) "
Phylogeny, Histology and Inferred Body Size Evolution in a New Rhabdodontid Dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Hungary".
PLoS ONE, 7 (9): e44318.
• Ösi A, Barrett PM, Evans AR, Nagy AL, Szenti I, Kukovecz Á, Magyar J, Segesdi M, Gere K and Jó V (2022)
"Multi-proxy dentition analyses reveal niche partitioning between sympatric herbivorous dinosaurs".
Scientific Reports, 12: 20813.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-24816-z.
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To cite this page:
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"
MOCHLODON :: from DinoChecker's dinosaur archive".
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