Alcovasaurus

Alcovasaurus is an extinct genus of herbivorous stegosaurian dinosaurs that lived in the Late Jurassic. It was found in the Morrison Formation of Wyoming, United States. The genus contains a single species, Alcovasaurus longispinus, originally assigned to the genus Stegosaurus. It is likely a member of the Dacentrurinae, and has been referred to the genus Miragaia by some authors.

== Discovery and naming == thumb|left|The geography of Alcova, Wyoming, where the remains of Alcovasaurus were discovered In July 1908, Professors William Harlow Reed and A.C. Dart of the University of Wyoming, in the Alcova Quarry in Natrona County, Wyoming, uncovered the skeleton of a stegosaurian. This would be the last major excavation of a dinosaur in which Reed was personally involved. In 1914, the find was named and described as Stegosaurus longispinus by Charles Whitney Gilmore on the basis of holotype UW 20503 (originally UW D54), a partial postcranial skeleton of an adult individual consisting of forty-two vertebrae, a fragmentary sacrum, two ischia, a portion of one pubis, the right femur, several ribs and four dermal tail spines. The specific name is derived from Latin longus, "long", and spina, "spine", in reference to the long tail spines. Due to the presence of very long tail spines, S. longispinus was treated as valid by subsequent authors. In 1993, S. longispinus was by George Olshevsky and Tracy Lee Ford seen as a possible North American species of the African genus Kentrosaurus as a ?Kentrosaurus longispinus.