Tharosaurus (meaning "Thar Desert lizard") is an extinct genus of potentially dubious eusauropod sauropod dinosaurs from the Middle Jurassic Jaisalmer Formation of India. The genus contains a single species, Tharosaurus indicus, known from a fragmentary skeleton including several vertebrae and a rib. When it was named in 2023, Tharosaurus was interpreted as the earliest known diplodocoid and the first member of this clade described from India. However, a later revision of the fossil material argued for a position outside of this clade, as an indeterminate eusauropod. This revision could not fi
Tharosaurus (meaning "Thar Desert lizard") is an extinct genus of potentially dubious eusauropod sauropod dinosaurs from the Middle Jurassic Jaisalmer Formation of India. The genus contains a single species, Tharosaurus indicus, known from a fragmentary skeleton including several vertebrae and a rib. When it was named in 2023, Tharosaurus was interpreted as the earliest known diplodocoid and the first member of this clade described from India. However, a later revision of the fossil material argued for a position outside of this clade, as an indeterminate eusauropod. This revision could not find unique features in the Tharosaurus specimen, so it was classified as a nomen dubium.
== Discovery and naming == thumb|left|Speculative life restoration as a dicraeosaurid The Tharosaurus holotype specimen, RWR-241 (A–K), was discovered between 2019 and 2021 in sediments of the Jaisalmer Formation near Jethwai village in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan state in western India. The specimen consists of partial cervical, dorsal, and caudal vertebrae and a dorsal rib.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).