Telmatosaurus

Telmatosaurus (meaning "marsh lizard") is a genus of basal hadrosauromorph dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Romania. It was relatively small for its group, measuring approximately in length and in body mass, which has been explained as an instance of insular dwarfism.

==Discovery== thumb|left|Size of Telmatosaurus compared to a human In 1895 some peasants presented Ilona Nopcsa, the daughter of their lord, with a dinosaur skull they had found at the estate Săcele in the district Hunedoara (then named Hunyad) in Transylvania. Ilona had an elder brother, Ferenc or Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás who was inspired by the find to become a paleontology student at the University of Vienna. In 1899 Nopcsa named the skull Limnosaurus transsylvanicus. The generic name was derived from Greek λιμνή, limné, "swamp", a reference to the presumed swamp-dwelling habits of hadrosaurs. The specific name referred to Transylvania. Later Nopcsa discovered that the name Limnosaurus had already been used by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1872 for a crocodilian (later reclassified as Pristichampsus), so in 1903 Nopcsa renamed the genus Telmatosaurus. Telma again means "marsh". In 1910 Barnum Brown, unaware of Nopcsa's replacement name, named the genus Hecatasaurus, but this is a junior objective synonym.