Sibirotitan ("Siberian titan") is a genus of somphospondyl sauropod from the Early Cretaceous (Barremian age) Ilek Formation of Russia. The type and only species is S. astrosacralis.
Sibirotitan ("Siberian titan") is a genus of somphospondyl sauropod from the Early Cretaceous (Barremian age) Ilek Formation of Russia. The type and only species is S. astrosacralis.
==Discovery and naming== thumb|left|Sacrum on display in Tomsk State University The material assigned to Sibirotitan was found in the Shestakovo 1 locality of the Ilek Formation, deposited in a cliff on the Kiya River's right bank, near Shestakovo Village in Kemerovo Province, West Siberia, Russia. Vertebrate remains were first recovered in 1953, and larger dinosaur fossils were found later in the sixties. Definitive sauropod remains were first discovered during expeditions in 1994 and 1995. In 2002, a reasonably complete foot would be described by Russian vertebrate paleontologist Alexander Averianov and colleagues; there was insufficient material to name the taxon, but they identified it as a member of Titanosauriformes, noting teeth from the locality indicated possible brachiosaur identity, but that a caudal vertebra from a nearby locality indicated the presence of a titanosaur as well. thumb|250px|Model Specimens would continue to turn up, and in 2018, Averianov et al. would name those which could be confidently referred to as the same taxon as S. astrosacralis; this included teeth, a sacrum, assorted vertebrae, and the previously described foot. This made it the second sauropod species named from the country, after Tengrisaurus, named earlier in the same year; the genus Arkharavia, named in 2010, although originally described as a sauropod, was later reassigned to Hadrosauridae. Earlier, in 2015, it had been informally nicknamed "Sibirosaurus" in the press. The final name of Sibirotitan was derived from Siberia, where it was found, and the Greek Τιτάν (titan), the second group of divine beings in Greek Mythology, preceding the Olympians. The specific name S. astrosacralis is derived from the Greek ἄστρον, meaning "star", and Latin os sacrum, meaning "sacred bone". This refers to the star-like way in which the sacral ribs radiate in dorsal view.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).