TANIUS

Although discovered by H.C. T'an in 1923, Tanius—the first formally named ornithischian dinosaur from China—is not much better understood now than it was back then. That's mainly because Austrian palaeontologist Otto Zdansky made a pig's ear of excavating what was initially a relatively complete skeleton in 1929, so when Carl Wiman arrived to name and describe what was left later the same year, he didn't have a great deal to work with. A lack of decent backup specimens in almost a century since has done little to help its cause. And when remains have turned up that it could lay claim to, palaeontologists weren't sure what to do with them.

Tanius has been classified as a hadrosaurid with lambeosaurine features, a lambeosaurine with hadrosaurid features, a primitive hadrosauroid and a chimaera, depending on scientific thought at any given time. Rozhdestvensky reckoned it to be a second species of the antennae-like crest-sporting Tsintaosaurus at one point, despite lacking the skull part that would've anchored a crest (if it had one). However, other features suggest it's unique and from a different family altogether.

In the past, three other species have been assigned to Tanius, but they each have their own issues. Tanius prynadai (Young, 1958) was formerly known as Bactrosaurus prynadai (Ryabnin, 1939), but Rozhdestvensky assigned its remains to Jaxartosaurus aralensis in 1968. Tanius chingkankouensis (Young, 1958) and Tanius laiyangensis (Zhen, 1976) are both considered synonymous with Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus.