Coloradisaurus

Coloradisaurus (meaning "Los Colorados lizard") is a genus of massospondylid sauropodomorph dinosaur. It lived during the Late Triassic period (Norian stage) in what is now La Rioja Province, Argentina. It is known from two specimens collected from the Los Colorados Formation of the Ischigualasto-Villa Unión Basin.

== Taxonomy == Coloradisaurus brevis was originally named Coloradia brevis by José Bonaparte in 1979, but that genus name was preoccupied by the pine moth Coloradia, so it needed a replacement name. In 1983, David Lambert used the name Coloradisaurus for the genus, but did not indicate it was a replacement or diagnose it. Lambert had gotten the name from Bonaparte in a personal communication and mistakenly thought that Bonaparte had already published it. Peter Galton was the next to use the name Coloradisaurus in 1990, which he credited to Lambert, when he gave the taxon a diagnosis in his review of prosauropods in The Dinosauria. Authorship of Coloradisaurus has traditionally been attributed to Lambert, but Greenfield, Bivens and Fonseca (2020) judged Lambert's use of the name to be a nomen nudum. They concluded that authorship should be attributed to Galton, who was the first to use the name Coloradisaurus in a way that met the requirements of the ICZN.