Welcome Yongjinglong datangi — a long-necked, plant-eating sauropod dinosaur found in northwestern China — to the list of gigantic creatures that called Earth home.
A team led by University of Pennsylvania paleontologists Liguo Li and Peter Dodson have characterized the fossil remains of a sauropod found in the Lanzhou Basin of Gansu province in 2008. The scientists found multiple bones that belonged to the sauropod that roamed the earth during the Early Cretaceous period — more than 100 million years ago — including teeth and vertebrae.
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In a University of Pennsylvania press release, the team reports that these fossils belonged to a 50-foot-long, juvenile sauropod with similarities to other sauropods found elsewhere in China, Africa, South America and the U.S.
This recent discovery supports the growing consensus among paleontologists that sauropods were a dominant group in the Early Cretaceous. They were once thought to be extinct during the period, having only thrived only during the Jurassic.
“We now realize that, in other parts of the world, particularly in South America and Asia, sauropod dinosaurs continued to flourish in the Cretaceous, so the thought that they were minor components is no longer a tenable view," said Dodson.
Yongjinglong belongs to a group of dinosaurs known as Titanosauria — a diverse group of sauropod dinosaurs and the largest and heaviest creatures to ever walk the earth. Yongjinglong is considered a medium-sized Titanosaur and, according to the open-access science journal PLOS ONE, one of the most evolutionarily advanced of the Titanosaurs discovered in Asia.
Since 2007, China has surpassed the U.S. in terms of species found; two other Titanosaurs — Daxiatitan binglingi and Huanghetitan liujiaxiaensis — have been discovered within the last decade in a valley about half a mile (1 kilometer) from the Yongjinlong fossils.