Rugocaudia is a potentially dubious genus of early titanosauriform sauropod dinosaurs known from the Early Cretaceous of Montana, United States.
Rugocaudia is a potentially dubious genus of early titanosauriform sauropod dinosaurs known from the Early Cretaceous of Montana, United States.
==Discovery and naming== Rugocaudia is known from the holotype specimen, MOR 334, a partial skeleton consisting of 18 caudal vertebrae and associated material including an isolated neural arch, tooth, chevron, and distal section of a metacarpal. It was collected from the Cloverly Formation, which dates to the Aptian or the Albian stage of the Early Cretaceous. Comparisons of the known material to contemporary sauropods (e.g. Sonorasaurus, Venenosaurus, and Paluxysaurus) suggested that its fossils represent a new taxon from the region. Rugocaudia cooneyi was described and named as a new genus and species by D.Cary Woodruff in 2012. The generic name is derived from the Latin ruga, "wrinkle" and cauda, "tail", referencing the highly rugose posterior margins of the caudal vertebrae. The specific name honors J. P. Cooney, the owner of the land on which the holotype was found.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).