A remarkable new genus and species of oviraptorid dinosaur has been unearthed in the Ganzhou area of Jiangxi Province, southern China.
An artist impression of Huanansaurus ganzhouensis. Image credit: Chuang Zhao.
The new dinosaur belongs to a group of feathered dinosaurs known as oviraptors. It has been given the official name Huanansaurus ganzhouensis.
The genus name refers to Huanan (in Chinese Pinyin), which means southern China, because the dinosaur was discovered in Ganzhou of Jiangxi Province. The species name refers to the locality of Ganzhou.
Huanansaurus ganzhouensis’ fossilized skeleton with a nearly complete skull was discovered and analyzed by paleontologists from Uppsala University in Sweden, Institute of Geology and the Henan Geological Museum in China, Hokkaido University in Japan, and the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources in South Korea.
“The specimen has a nearly complete skull including lower jaws. Seven cervical vertebrae are preserved; the first four are almost complete whereas the last three are only preserved as fragments or impressions,” the scientists wrote in the paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The partial humerus, ulna, radius and complete hand of the right arm, the left hand, a small portion of the distal end of the right femur, the proximal end of the right tibia, and the distal portion of the right pes are preserved.”
Photograph of the skull of Huanansaurus ganzhouensis. Scale bar - 5 cm. Image credit: Lu, J. et al.
Huanansaurus ganzhouensis was a small two-legged dinosaur with a parrot-like beak and a crest on top of its skull. But it had a different jaw structure than most oviraptorid dinosaurs.
This new dinosaur was a cousin of the Mongolian Citipati and lived in the Upper Cretaceous epoch, about 72 million years ago.
“The most closely related to Huanansaurus is Citipati, which was found approximately 3,000 km northeast in the Djadokhta Formation at Ankylosaur Flats, Mongolia,” the paleontologists wrote in the paper.
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Lu, J. et al. 2015. A New Oviraptorid Dinosaur (Dinosauria: Oviraptorosauria) from the Late Cretaceous of Southern China and Its Paleobiogeographical Implications. Sci. Rep. 5, 11490; doi: 10.1038/srep11490
