A giant dinosaur skull found in southern China appears to belong to an entirely new species, according to a team of paleontologists who studied the specimen.
Paleontologists found a fossilized skull in the Lufeng Dinosaur National Geopark in Yunnan Province, China. The team determined that the skull belonged to a sauropodomorph – a group of dinosaurs that also includes giant herbivorous sauropods such as Brachiosaurus— albeit one entirely new to the scientific record.
The research team synchronized the animal Lishulong is fragrant—”lishu” from the Chinese way of writing for the chestnut tree, “long” in reference to the dragon, and “wangi” after the vertebrate paleontologist of the same name.
The team believes in it Lishulong is fragrant it can grow up to 33 feet (10 meters) in length. The team’s findings were published last month in PeerJ.
“Based on the current fossil record, Lishulong is fragrant is the largest early Jurassic sauropodomorph in China and is considered morphologically mature,” the team wrote in the paper.
The team added that the animal has the largest skull of any known sauropodomorph from the Lufeng Formation, indicating that researchers may need to revisit related specifics to better understand the size of animals in the group.
Zhang said LiveScience that the large dinosaur was probably herbivorous and could be distinguished from its sister taxon—Yunnanosaurus— with its larger nostrils. The animal’s fossilized skull is about 15.75 inches (40 centimeters) long, surpassing the previous largest skull in the region (which belonged to Jingshanosaurus pattern) by about two inches (5 cm).
The large skull is just the latest discovery in China. In 2023, the team discovered a a magnificent fossil a mammal apparently hunting a beaked dinosaur; the previous year, a group of paleontologists published evidence of the opposite, in the shape of a mammal’s foot within a fossilized one microraptor.
In 2021, paleontologists published several fossil finds from the country, including remains of a nesting oviraptor (along with fossilized dinosaur eggs), the astonishing remains of a dinosaur cloacaand 500 million year old penis worms from Yunnan, the same province where paleontologists made the discovery L. fragrant.
The team proposed that the discovery L. fragrant could offer insight into the distribution of this animal and its closest dinosaur relatives across Earth’s ancient supercontinent.
“Paleobiodiversity of early Gondwana sauropodomorphs appears to decrease slightly after the Triassic-Jurassic boundary,” the researchers wrote. “Therefore, we hypothesize that non-sauropod sauropodomorph genera survived and spread rapidly in Laurasia, especially in China.” In other words, early sauropodomorphs declined in Gondwana, but prospered and diversified in Laurasia, especially in China.
Still Lishulong is fragrant not as big as some of the really massive sauropods such as titanosaurs, the animal still outstrips modern land animals water um, earth. The newly described fossil is now on display at the Lufeng World Dinosaur Valley Museum.