Yingshanosaurus

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Yingshanosaurus

Yingshanosaurus (meaning “Yingshan or Golden Hills reptile”) is a genus of stegosaurian dinosaur from the Late Jurassic, around 155 million years ago. It was a herbivore that lived in what is now China. The type species is Yingshanosaurus jichuanensis.

Like all stegosaurians, Yingshanosaurus was an herbivorous dinosaur. It was about four to five metres long. The thighbone has a length of 675 millimetres, the shinbone of forty-six centimetres. The humerus is forty centimetres long. Four vertebrae of the sacrum (S2-S5) were solidly fused to the ilia of the pelvis, the spaces between the sacral ribs being almost closed, reduced to oval depressions pierced from below by small openings, no more than a centimetre in cross-section. The neural arches are of medium height. The neural spines of the dorsal vertebrae are plate-like in side view and have a transversely expanded top.

Yingshanosaurus had a pair of about eighty centimetres long wing-like spines on its shoulders, similar in shape and relative size to those of Gigantspinosaurus. The shoulder spine has a large flat trapezoidal base; after a sudden kink, a more narrow straight shaft, flat but with a protruding ridge on the outer side, projects to behind from the lower base edge. The bony plates on its back were rather small and relatively low, triangular or fin-shaped. The largest plates, about fifteen centimetres high and with a base length of twenty centimetres, are similar in profile to those of Hesperosaurus, though of a more reduced relative size. They were not “splates”, i.e. featuring a thickened middle section, but almost uniformly flat, with a rough and veined surface.

Zhu placed Yingshanosaurus, within the Stegosauridae, in the Stegosaurinae.

Source: www.Wikipedia.org