Paleontologists working in southern China have identified a new species of sauropod dinosaur that appears to belong to a group never before documented anywhere in East Asia.
An artist’s impression of Yantaloong lini. Image credit: TotalDino / CC BY 4.0.
Yantaloong lini roamed our planet during the Middle Jurassic epoch, between 174 and 161 million years ago.
The ancient species likely belongs to Turiasauria, a clade of large, long-necked sauropods that flourished from the Early Jurassic to the Early Cretaceous.
The evolutionary relationships within the clade remain one of the more debated topics in sauropod paleontology.
“Turiasauria were originally defined in 2006 as all Eusauropoda closer to Turiasaurus riodevensis than to Saltasaurus loricatus and formed a monophyletic group outside the Neosauropoda,” said Dr. Ya-Ming Wang from the Geological Museum of China and colleagues.
“Although the monophyly of Turiasauria was questioned in 2009, later studies have reaffirmed Turiasauria as a valid clade.”
“Nevertheless, the internal composition of this group remains uncertain and subject to ongoing revision.”
“Until now, Turiasauria have been found from the Lower Jurassic to Lower Cretaceous of Europe, North America, Africa, and India.”
The researchers identified Yantaloong lini from six presacral vertebrae found in the Zhanghe Formation in China’s Yunnan province.
“The Middle Jurassic of China hosts a diverse dinosaur fauna dominated by mamenchisaurid sauropods, along with some early diverging eusauropod and neosauropod members,” they said.
“However, no transitional species have been confirmed in East Asia along the evolutionary path from mamenchisaurids to neosauropods.”
Yantaloong lini, according to the scientists, may fill this gap.
In most of the team’s phylogenetic analyses, the species landed inside an unconventional version of Turiasauria, a clade that includes Lapparentosaurus, Jobaria, and Atlasaurus genera.
A few alternative analyses placed it instead as a sauropod outside the traditional turiasaurian grouping, or even within Neosauropoda itself, though the authors consider those scenarios less likely.
Anatomically, Yantaloong lini is something of a mosaic: its vertebrae combine advanced features more typical of dicraeosaurines and titanosaurs with older, more primitive traits characteristic of earliest eusauropods.
“Yantaloong lini provides a better understanding of the vertebral morphological diversity in sauropods, such as the pneumatization and the hyposphene-hypantrum complex, which further supports its phylogenetic position as a form transitional towards Neosauropoda,” the paleontologists concluded.
“The new species probably represents the first discovery of a turiasaurian sauropod in China and even in East Asia.”
The discovery of Yantaloong lini is reported in a paper in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
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Xiao-Qin Zhang et al. 2026. The first turiasaurian sauropod (Dinosauria: Eusauropoda) from East Asia. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 206 (2): zlaf201; doi: 10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaf201
