Craterosaurus
genus of reptiles (fossil)
Craterosaurus (meaning krater reptile or bowl reptile) is a dubious genus of stegosaurian dinosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous (possibly Aptian stage) of the Woburn Sands Formation of England. Estimated to measure around 4 m (13 ft) in length and weighing approximately 560 kg (1,230 lb), Craterosaurus may actually be a junior synonym of Regnosaurus, but only one fossil, a partial vertebra, was recovered.
History of naming
A fossil was discovered by Mr. Charlesworth in the Woburn Sands Formation near Potton, Bedfordshire, in a brown sandstone layer with many phosphate nodules. In 1874 this fossil was described by British palaeontologist Harry Govier Seeley as a new taxon, named Craterosaurus pottonensis. The holotype and only definitive specimen of Craterosaurus is stored in the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences under accession number SMC B.28814. Seeley interpreted Craterosaurus as being represented by a partial braincase, which he found showed support for it as a member of Dinosauria with uncertain relationships. It was possible that Craterosaurus could be aligned with Ceteosauria or Iguanodon, but with limited material to compare Seeley did not classify Craterosaurus further.
In 1912 Hungarian palaeontologist Franz Nopcsa re-evaluated Craterosaurus with the hope that it could be classified more confidently, identifying that the material, which Seeley believed was a braincase, was instead part of the neural arch of a dorsal vertebra. From this, Nopcsa was able to positively compare Craterosaurus to Stegosaurus, as a member of Stegosauria.
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This entry incorporates text from “Craterosaurus” 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.