Perijasaurus (meaning "Perija lizard") is a genus of basal eusauropod sauropod dinosaur from the "Girón-type redbeds" of the La Quinta Formation of Cesar Department, north-eastern Colombia. The type species is Perijasaurus lapaz. It lived during the Toarcian-Aalenian boundary around 175 million years ago (early to middle Jurassic period).
Perijasaurus (meaning "Perija lizard") is a genus of basal eusauropod sauropod dinosaur from the "Girón-type redbeds" of the La Quinta Formation of Cesar Department, north-eastern Colombia. The type species is Perijasaurus lapaz. It lived during the Toarcian-Aalenian boundary around 175 million years ago (early to middle Jurassic period).
== Discovery and naming == The holotype, UCMP 37689, is a broken dorsal vertebra, around tall and centimeters long. It was discovered on 27 March 1943 at the western flank of the Serranía del Perijá mountain range by the Tropical Oil Company and was sent to the fossil collection at the University of California, Berkeley. Starting in 1955, UCMP 37689 had been mentioned in the literature with no consensus developing over its affinities. Eventually, the original site was rediscovered and the bone was prepared, allowing it to be named as a new genus and species, Perijasaurus lapaz, in 2022. The generic name, "Perijasaurus", honors the mountain range where the fossil was found. The specific name, "lapaz", honors the town of La Paz, Cesar, near where the discovery was made, as well as the peace agreement that allowed the described to perform fieldwork in the area ("la paz" in Spanish means "the peace").
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).