Marshosaurus
| Marshosaurus Temporal range: Late Jurassic
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| Reconstructed skull of Marshosaurus at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History | |
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| Genus: | Marshosaurus
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| Species: | M. bicentesimus
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| Binomial name | |
| Marshosaurus bicentesimus Madsen, 1976
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Marshosaurus was a genus of medium sized theropod, with a size up to 5 or 6 meters in length and a skull about 60 cm long. It is known from parts of at least three (possibly 4) individuals from the Morrison Formation of Utah and Colorado.
The holotype is a left ilium, or upper pelvis bone found at the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry in central Utah. It was named by James Madsen (1976) for Othniel Charles Marsh, who described many dinosaur fossils during the Bone Wars. The species name was chosen "in honor of the bicentennial of the United States of America" (Madsen, 1976, p. 52)
Characters on the skeleton show it was an avetheropod, a member of Avetheropoda, a group of more bird-like theropods including Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor and Allosaurus. Paleontologists are not sure which family this dinosaur belongs to; it may be a carnosaurian or a coelurosaurian. It lived during the Kimmeridgian (Late Jurassic), approximately 155 - 150 mya.
References
Madsen, J. H. 1976. A second new theropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of east central Utah. Utah Geology 3(1):51-60
External links
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