Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Ampelosaurus
Summary
Ampelosaurus (ˌæmpɪloʊˈsɔːrəs ; meaning "vine lizard") is a titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Period of what is now France. Its type species is A. atacis, named by Le Loeuff in 1995. Its remains were found in a level dating from 71.5 million years ago representing the early Maastrichtian.
Like most sauropods, it would have had a long neck and tail but it also carried armor in the form of osteoderms. In 2005, over 500 bones have been assigned to Ampelosaurus and additional material has been found since, including a partially articulated skeleton with skull, which makes it one of the best known dinosaurs in France. However, recent studies suggest that the type locality is not a monospecific titanosaur bone bed and that part of the bones attributed to Ampelosaurus probably belong to a second titanosaurian taxon.
Ampelosaurus lived on what was the Ibero-Armorican Island, a landmass including much of present-day France and Iberian Peninsula. Histological studies show characteristics related to an island environment such as a slowed growth rate. However, with a size of about in length for the largest known individual, Ampelosaurus was not an insular dwarf unlike some other Ibero-Armorican titanosaurs like Lirainosaurus and Atsinganosaurus, or the genus Magyarosaurus from the Hateg island.
Several specimens found elsewhere in France and Spain were referred to Ampelosaurus but were later identified as belonging to other titanosaurs.
Ampelosaurus is known by abundant remains from the Bellevue site near the village of Campagne-sur-Aude in the Upper Aude Valley, in Aude department in Occitania region. It was recovered in the lower levels of the Marnes Rouges Inférieures Formation, which belong to the early Maastrichtian epoch of the Late Cretaceous Period, ~ 70 million years ago. These sediments represent an ancient floodplain with numerous river channels. Historically, the dinosaurs of the Upper Aude Valley were first reported by Paul Gervais in 1877 from two vertebrae discovered in the commune of Fa.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.