TAPUIASAURUS
A nemegtosaurid titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of Brasil.
Pronunciation:
Meaning: Tapuia lizard
Author/s: Zaher
et al. (
2011)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Minas Gerais, Brazil
Discovery Chart Position: #767
Tapuiasaurus macedoi
(Macedo's Tapuia Lizard)Etymology
Tapuiasaurus is a combunation of "Tapuia" (a generic name from the Jês
indigenous language used to designate tribes that inhabited
the inner regions of Brazil) and the Greek "sauros" (lizard).
The
species epithet,
macedoi, honors Ubirajara Alves Macedo, who first discovered the deposits near Coração de Jesus. In a completely unrelated event, a maned compsognathid dinosaur from Brasil was named
Ubirajara—which, in Tupi, means "lord of the spear"—in December 2020.
ZooBank registry:
urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:9430DEDA-7C76-482B-8A23-912AC854836E.
Discovery
The first fossils of
Tapuiasaurus were discovered in the Embira-Branca hills, Coração de Jesus city, in claystone of the Quiricó Formation (Sanfranciscana Basin), Minas Gerais, Brazil by Ubirajara Alves Macedo.
The
holotype (MZSP-PV 807) is a partial skeleton that consists of an almost complete skull and lower jaw, atlas, axis, five neck and five back vertebrae with ribs, left sternal plate, right coracoid (part of the shoulder assembly), right humerus (upper arm), left radius and
ulna (lower arm), toe bones, femora (thigh), left shank bone, and an almost complete left foot.
A carnivorous dinosaur that would be named
Spectrovenator ragei in September 2020 was discovered lurking beneath the holotype of
Tapuiasaurus while it was being partially prepared in the field.
Estimations
Timeline:
Era: Mesozoic
Epoch: Early Cretaceous
Stage: Aptian
Age range: 125-112 mya
Stats:
Est. max. length: ?
Est. max. hip height: ?
Est. max. weight: ?
Diet: Herbivore
References
• Zaher H, Pol D, Carvalho AB, Nascimento PM, Riccomini C, Larson P, Juarez-Valieri R, Pires-Domingues R, Silva Jr NJ da and Almeida Campos D de (2011) "
A Complete Skull of an Early Cretaceous Sauropod and the Evolution of Advanced Titanosaurians."
PLoS ONE, 6(2): e16663.
• Wilson JA, Pol D, Carvalho AB and Zaher H (2016) "The skull of the titanosaur
Tapuiasaurus macedoi (Dinosauria: Sauropoda), a basal titanosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Brazil".
Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 178(3). DOI: 10.1111/zoj.12420.
• Carballido JL, Pol D, Otero A, Cerda IA, Salgado L, Garrido AC, Ramezani J, Cúneo NR and Krause JM (2017) "A new giant titanosaur sheds light on body mass evolution among sauropod dinosaurs".
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284(1860): 20171219. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.1219.
• Zaher H, Pol D, Navarro BA, Delcourt R and Carvalho AB (2020) "
An Early Cretaceous theropod dinosaur from Brazil sheds light on the cranial evolution of the Abelisauridae".
Comptes Rendus Palevol, 19(6): 101-115.
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To cite this page:
Atkinson, L.
"
TAPUIASAURUS :: from DinoChecker's dinosaur archive".
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http://www.dinochecker.com/dinosaurs/TAPUIASAURUS›. Web access: 06th Mar 2026.
