Aralosaurus
genus of reptiles (fossil)
Aralosaurus is a genus of lambeosaurine hadrosaurid dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous in what is now Kazakhstan. It is known only by a posterior half of a skull (devoid of its mandible) and some post-cranial bones found in the Bostobe Formation in rocks dated from the Upper Santonian - lower Campanian boundary, at about 83.6 Ma (millions of years ago). Only one species is known, Aralosaurus tuberiferus, described by Anatoly Konstantinovich Rozhdestvensky in 1968. The genus name means "Aral Sea lizard", because it was found to the northeast of the Aral Sea. The specific epithet tuberiferus means "bearing a tuber" because the posterior part of the nasal bone rises sharply in front of the orbits like an outgrowth.
Aralosaurus was originally reconstituted with a nasal arch similar to that of North American Kritosaurus (a comparison based on a specimen now placed in the genus Gryposaurus). For many years, Aralosaurus was thus placed in the clade Hadrosaurinae. This classification was invalidated in 2004, following the re-examination of the skull of the animal which allowed to identify in Aralosaurus many typical characters of Lambeosaurinae. In particular, this study revealed that the genus had a hollow bony structure located far in front of the orbits, which communicated with the respiratory tract. However, this structure is broken at its base, so its shape and size remain undetermined.
“Aralosaurus” enters the record as genus of reptiles (fossil). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Aralosaurus, genus and reptiles can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q132769. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aralosaurus” 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.