Welcoming Zhanghenglong

It has been a while coming on the Musings, but here’s something that’s bordering on traditional palaeontology. However, it is based on ornithischians, so obviously doesn’t quite count. That is a joke before I start getting all the complaints in the comments – I’m genuinely pleased to finally be on a paper that focuses on the other side of the Dinosauria after all my saurischian work. Anyway, long term readers will remember this post from back in 2011 about creating plaster jackets in the field. This was from a trip down in Henan were we turned up a number of specimens (and interestingly, Xu Xing was called away up to Zhucheng becuase of the discovery of what would turn out be Zhuchengtyrannus). At the time we had something that looked like a hadrosaur of some sort, and the blocks you can see us removing in the other post form the core of the new paper.

So say hello to Zhanghenglong, a basal hadrosauroid from the Late Cretaceous. Somewhat inevitably there’s not much of it, though there is a good maxilla (shown below) and dentary, as well as dorsal vertebrae, ribs, a scapula and a tibia. Phylogenetically it comes out as a hadrosauroid, but very close to the base of Hadrosauridae and gives some additional support to the idea of an Asian origin for hadrosaur groups with the nearest relatives to hadrosaurs being from Asia, as are the earliest lambeosaurines at at least a couple of members of the hadrosaurines. Happily the full paper is at PLoS ONE so all the information is fully accessible if you want more.

 

Xing H, Wang D, Han F, Sullivan C, Ma Q, et al. (2014) A New Basal Hadrosauroid Dinosaur (Dinosauria: Ornithopoda) with Transitional Features from the Late Cretaceous of Henan Province, China. PLoS ONE 9(6): e98821. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0098821