Happy July 4th everyone!

title says it

This week’s dinosaur is the well known Hadrosaur Edmontosaurus. Edmontosaurus (pronounced “Ed-Mon-Toe-Sore-Us”) was first found in 1917 by Lawrence Lambe (which Lambeosaurus is named after) in Alberta, Canada. There have been many other skeletons found in Wyoming and maybe Alaska. So many fossils have been found of Edmontosaurus that the skeleton is regarded as a benchmark; the shape to which all other Hadrosaurids are compared.

Edmontosaurus’s tail is deep and heavy, used to balance when walking on hind legs, and the hands have weight-bearing pads on the fingers for when on all fours. Several special skeletons have been found of Edmontosaurus. One skull shows signs of theropod tooth marks suggesting an attack to the neck, while another has a chunk bitten out of the top of the tail. The size of the bite to the tail suggests it was bitten by a Tyrannosaurid mouth.

One of the most unique things we know about Edmontosaurus that we don't know of other dinosaurs is that the skin of Edmontosaurus was leathery with non-overlapping scales. This find was discovered with two mummified skeletons; at least one of which had food still in its digestion tract. Edmontosaurus was about 43 feet long (about the size or larger than a boxcar), about 13 feet tall (when on all fours), and is estimated to have weighted around 4 tonnes. Its scientific classification is as follows:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Reptilia
Superorder: Dinosauria
Order: Ornithischia
Suborder: Ornithopoda
Family: Hadrosauridae
Subfamily: Hadrosaurinae
Genus: Edmontosaurus

This week’s dinosaur is the last continuation of the voted dinosaurs. This week it is Gojirasaurus. Gojirasaurus was found in New Mexico in the Bull Canyon Formation by Kenneth Carpenter. As a child he was fascinated by the 1954 Japanese science fiction film Godzilla, which later sparked his interest in paleontology and dinosaurs. He named his newly found fossil Gojirasaurus in honor of his childhood passion. The dinosaur is only known from a partial skeleton, consisting of ribs, bits of backbone, and the shoulder girdle, part of the hips and hind leg, and a tooth. The skeleton is also believed to be a juvenile so there is no good idea of the size of an adult. Also, the restoration of the animal is hard to put together. What is known is that it is a meat-eater and is part of the Coelophysis family.

Gojirasaurus skeleton is 18 feet long and it is speculated that the animal weighed around (when older) 330-440 pounds. The scientific classification is as follows:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Reptilia
Superorder: Dinosauria
Order: Saurischia
Suborder: Theropoda
Superfamily: Coelophysoidea
Genus: Gojirasaurus

This week’s dinosaur is the little-known Sauroposeidon. Sauroposeidon (pronounced Sore-O-Po-Sye-Don) was found in 1994 by Dr. Richard Cifelli in Oklahoma. There was only four neck vertebrae found in an old claystone prison yard. The thing that made this vertebrae set apart from others found was its sheer size; when first found it was thought the four pieces were fossilized tree trunks (the largest one is 4.6 feet long). They are very similar to those of the more famous Brachiosaurus, but about 15-25% bigger and due to some new research it suggests that Sauroposeidon was slimmer as well.

Given the nature of the Sauropod species and the thought that when they walked the ground shook, the vertebrae was given a new genus name Sauroposeidon; named after the Greek god of the sea because he was associated with earthquakes. If the proportions are correct, if Sauroposeidon was to raise its neck it would be 65.5 feet above the ground (a 6-story building).

Another feature of Sauroposeidon in the vertebrae is that they are sculpted into thin plates and fine struts, as in other Brachiosaurids, the bones have tiny air cells inside them to keep the weight down. It is estimated that Sauroposeidon was around 98 feet long and weighed around 130,000 pounds or 59 tonnes. Its scientific classification is as follows:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Reptilia
Superorder: Dinosauria
Order: Saurischia
Suborder: Sauropodomorpha
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Brachiosauridae
Genus: Sauroposeidon