Ultrasaurus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 An artist's impression of Ultrasaurus.
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
Extinct (fossil)
|
||||||||||||||
| Scientific classification | ||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
?U. tabriensis |
- This article is about Ultrasaurus, a dubious dinosaur from South Korea. The article on the invalid giant dinosaur from Utah, in the United States, is at Ultrasauros. For the fictional Zoid based on this dinosaur, see Ultrasaurus (Zoids).
Ultrasaurus is the official name of a dinosaur discovered by Haang Mook Kim in South Korea, but the name was first used in 1979 by Jim Jensen to describe a set of giant dinosaur bones he discovered in the United States.
[edit] Mistaken assessments
The bones discovered by Jim Jensen, of Brigham Young University, at the Dry Mesa Quarry, Utah were originally believed to belong to the largest dinosaur ever, so the name was widely used by the press and in scientific literature.
Haang Mook Kim published a paper in 1983, describing a new dinosaur which he named Ultrasaurus tabriensis, because he believed it was an equally giant relative of Jensen's dinosaur. However, Kim's assessment was incorrect. His dinosaur was much smaller than he believed, because he mistook a leg bone (femur) for an arm bone (humerus). However, since Kim was the first to publish the name Ultrasaurus, the name officially applies to the South Korean dinosaur.
Jensen published a paper describing his discovery in 1985, but since the name Ultrasaurus was already in use (preoccupied), his discovery was renamed in 1991 to Ultrasauros. However, Jensen also made a mistake. His discovery was a chimera; the fossils belonged to two different dinosaurs, both of which already had names. So his new name, Ultrasauros, is now just an alternate name (junior synonym) for the dinosaur officially known as Supersaurus.
Kim's Ultrasaurus is currently nomen dubium, which means not enough is known about the specimen to formally assign it to a specific family of sauropods. It may even be a member of a known genus or species, which would make the name Ultrasaurus a junior synonym as well.
[edit] Description
Kim's Ultrasaurus lived 100 to 110 million years ago, during the Aptian and Albian ages of the early Cretaceous. It is known from part of an upper forearm (humerus), and some back bones (vertebrae).
[edit] Further reading
- "Cretaceous dinosaurs from South Korea", by Haang Mook Kim in 1983. Journal of the Geological Society of Korea, volume 19, issue 3, pages 115 to 126.
