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Concept
Vallibonavenatrix
Summary
Vallibonavenatrix (meaning "Vallibona huntress" after the town near where its remains were found) is a genus of spinosaurid dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous (Barremian) Arcillas de Morella Formation of Castellón, Spain. The type and only species is Vallibonavenatrix cani, known from a partial skeleton.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, amateur fossil collector Juan Cano Forner was recovering bones from various localities in Els Ports Natural Park, located in the Province of Castellón, Spain. In one of these—the Santa Águeda locality in the town of Vallibona—he excavated numerous vertebrate remains dating to the Mesozoic era, among which were dinosaur fossils. Forner housed these fossils in a private collection at Sant Mateu, which the Generalitat Valenciana acknowledged as a museographic collection in 1994. In 2007, the Spanish palaeontologist Fernando Gómez-Fernández and colleagues published a provisional description on the pelvis of a theropod from Forner's collection. Further fossils from the same specimen included a cervical (neck) vertebra, six dorsal (back) vertebrae, an almost complete sacrum, fragments of neurapophyses, four caudal (tail) vertebrae, ten partial ribs and rib fragments, three incomplete chevrons, an almost complete left ilium (main hip bone), fragments of the ventral part of a right ilium, incomplete right and left ischia (lower and rearmost hip bone), and a fragment interpreted as belonging to the proximal part of a pubis (pubic bone).
In 2019, Elisabete Malafaia and colleagues published their description of a new genus and species of spinosaurid dinosaur, Vallibonavenatrix cani, with the partial skeleton as the holotype specimen. The generic name refers to the town of Vallibona, with the Latin suffix "-venatrix", meaning "huntress". The specific name honours Cano Forner, the fossil's discoverer. Vallibonavenatrix represents the most complete spinosaurid specimen recovered from the Iberian Peninsula. Other Iberian spinosaurids include Protathlitis, Camarillasaurus, and Iberospinus.
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