Alamosaurus
Sign in to saveAlamosaurus (; meaning "Ojo Alamo lizard") is a genus of titanosaurian sauropod dinosaurs containing a single known species, Alamosaurus sanjuanensis, from the Maastrichtian age of the Late Cretaceous period in what is now southwestern North America. It is one of the few known titanosaurs to have inhabited North America after the nearly 30-million-year absence of sauropods from the North American fossil record ("sauropod hiatus") and probably represents an immigrant from South America.
Article
7 sectionsContents
- History of discovery
- Description
- Classification
- Paleogeography
- Paleoenvironment
- References
- Notes
Alamosaurus (; meaning "Ojo Alamo lizard") is a genus of titanosaurian sauropod dinosaurs containing a single known species, Alamosaurus sanjuanensis, from the Maastrichtian age of the Late Cretaceous period in what is now southwestern North America. It is one of the few known titanosaurs to have inhabited North America after the nearly 30-million-year absence of sauropods from the North American fossil record ("sauropod hiatus") and probably represents an immigrant from South America.
Adults would have measured around long, tall at the shoulder and weighed up to , though some specimens indicate a larger body size. Isolated vertebrae and limb bones suggest that it could have reached sizes comparable to Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus, which would make it the absolute largest dinosaur known from North America. Its fossils have been recovered from a variety of rock formations in the southwestern United States that were dated to the latest Maastrichtian age.