
Kangnasaurus (meaning "Farm Kangnas lizard") is a genus of elasmarian ornithopod dinosaur found in Late Cretaceous rocks of South Africa. It is known from a tooth and possibly some postcranial remains dating between the middle-Campanian to Maastrichtian Kalahari Deposits Formation.
Kangnasaurus (meaning "Farm Kangnas lizard") is a genus of elasmarian ornithopod dinosaur found in Late Cretaceous rocks of South Africa. It is known from a tooth and possibly some postcranial remains dating between the middle-Campanian to Maastrichtian Kalahari Deposits Formation.
==Discovery and naming== 200px|left|thumb|Holotype tooth of K. coetzeei (SAM 2732) as seen from three different angles; figured from Haughton (1915) Kangnasaurus was named in 1915 by Sidney H. Haughton. The type species is Kangnasaurus coetzeei. The generic name refers to the Kangnas farm; the specific name to the farmer, Coetzee. Kangnasaurus is based on holotype SAM 2732, a tooth found at a depth of 34 metres in a well at Farm Kangnas, in the Orange River valley of northern Cape Province, South Africa. The age of these rocks, conglomerates in an ancient crater lake, was once suggested to date to the Early Cretaceous (probably early-Aptian) due to the original phylogenetic position of the taxa as a dryosaurid. But a Late Cretaceous age between the Campanian and Maastrichtian is more likely due to sedimentological analyses. Haughton thought SAM 2732 was a tooth from the upper jaw, but Michael Cooper reidentified it as a lower jaw tooth in 1985. This had implications for its classification: Haughton thought the tooth was that of an iguanodontid, while Cooper identified it as from an animal more like Dryosaurus, a more basal ornithopod.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).