Huabeisaurus
genus of reptiles (fossil)
Huabeisaurus (, meaning "North China lizard") was a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian to Maastrichtian stages, around 99.7–70.6 million years ago) of what is present-day northern China. The type species, Huabeisaurus allocotus, was first described by Pang Qiqing and Cheng Zhengwu in 2000. It is known from numerous remains found in the 1990s, which include teeth, partial limbs and vertebrae. Due to its relative completeness, Huabeisaurus represents a significant taxon for understanding sauropod evolution in Asia. Huabeisaurus comes from Kangdailiang and Houyu, Zhaojiagou Town, Tianzhen County, Shanxi province, China. The holotype was found in the unnamed upper member of the Huiquanpu Formation, which is Late Cretaceous (?Cenomanian–?Campanian) in age based on ostracods, charophytes, and fission-track dating.
Huabeisaurus measures 20 metres (66 ft) long and 5 metres (16 ft) high, as estimated by Pang and Cheng in 2000. It would have been a quadrupedal herbivore with a long neck and tail, like most other sauropods. The skeleton has been presumed to have belonged to an almost mature individual, because it lacks sutures on vertebrae, but not on pelvic material. A set of 12 characters were identified by D'Emic et al.
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This entry incorporates text from “Huabeisaurus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.