Liubangosaurus

Liubangosaurus (meaning "Liubang lizard", after Liubang village, the holotype locality) is a genus of sauropod dinosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous in what is now China. Liubangosaurus is known from the holotype NHMG 8152, five complete and articulated middle-caudal dorsal vertebrae that were collected from the Xinlong Formation in Fusui County, Guangxi Province. The type species is L. hei, which honors He Wenjian, who discovered the site where Liubangosaurus was discovered. ==Discovery and naming== Sauropod remains were first discovered at the Liubang Quarry in 2001, near the village of the same name (Liubang) which is near the city of Nanning in the Guangxi Province of southern China. This locality corresponds to the Napai Formation, which is Early Cretaceous in age. Subsequent excavations determined that remains from a minimum of three individual specimens were present in the quarry. The largest of these would eventually be described as the new genus Fusuisaurus. The two smaller specimens were mostly disarticulated, which made it difficult for researchers to distinguish which bones belonged to which individuals. The remains were excavated with the help of the Natural History Museum of Guangxi, which is where the specimens were eventually stored. However, five caudal vertebrae among these remains were articulated, which was deemed sufficient to name and describe the new genus and species Liubangosaurus hei. It was fully described and named in 2010 by Mo Jinyou, Xu Xing, and Eric Buffetaut.

==Description== The holotype of Liubangosaurus was given the specimen number NHMG 8152. It consists of five articulated dorsal vertebrae, believed to represent the fifth through ninth dorsal vertebrae. The largest of these vertebrae (the fifth dorsal) has a total height of . The fragmentary nature of the specimen makes the full size of Liubangosaurus difficult to estimate. Rubén Molina-Pérez and Asier Larramendi estimated its full size as being long, tall at the shoulder, and 26 tons