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Concept
Struthiosaurus
Summary
Struthiosaurus (Latin struthio = ostrich + Greek sauros = lizard) is a genus of nodosaurid dinosaurs, from the Late Cretaceous period (Santonian-Maastrichtian) of Austria, Romania, France and Hungary in Europe. It was a small dinosaur, measuring in length and weighing .
In 1859, geologist Eduard Suess at the Gute Hoffnung coal mine at Muthmannsdorf near Wiener Neustadt in Austria, discovered a dinosaur tooth on a stone pile. With the help of mine intendant Pawlowitsch it was attempted to find the source of the fossil material. The search proved fruitless at first but ultimately a thin marl layer was discovered, intersected by an obliquely sloping mine shaft, which contained an abundant number of various bones. These were subsequently excavated by Suess and Ferdinand Stoliczka. The marl was a fresh water deposit, now considered part of the Grünbach Formation.
The finds were stored in the museum of the University of Vienna but received little attention until they were studied by Emanuel Bunzel in 1870. In 1871, Bunzel published a treatise describing the fossils and naming several new genera and species. One of them was the genus Struthiosaurus based on a single partial portion of the posterior end of the skull, largely consisting of the braincase. The type and only known species of the genus at the time was Struthiosaurus austriacus. Bunzel stated that he only provisionally named the taxon and gave no etymology of the name. The generic name is derived from Neo-Latin struthio, itself derived from Ancient Greek στρούθειος, stroutheios, "of the ostrich". Bunzel chose the name because of the birdlike morphology of the braincase. The specific name refers to the provenance from Austria.
Apart from the braincase, Bunzel unknowingly described other material of Struthiosaurus. He recognized that there were bones and osteoderms of armoured dinosaurs among the finds and referred them to a Scelidosaurus sp. and a Hylaeosaurus sp. These British genera represented the best known thyreophoran forms found at the time.
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