Xiaosaurus
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| Xiaosaurus Fossil range: Middle Jurassic |
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Xiaosaurus (little lizard, pronounced /ʃaʊˈsɔrəs/, from Chinese xiao 小, little), is a dubious genus of small herbivorous dinosaur of the Bathonian age (middle Jurassic, approximately 169 to 163 mya). Xiaosaurus lived in the Sichuan Basin of China. It is known only from teeth and a few isolated bones, remains too fragmentary to accurately classify the genus. It is definitely a member of the order Ornithischia, and possibly a hypsilophodontid or marginocephalian. The type species, X. dashanpensis (Dong Zhiming & Tang Zilu, 1983), has sometimes been considered dubious, but Barrett et al. (2006) consider it to be provisionally valid. Xiaosaurus may provide an evolutionary link from Lesothosaurus to Hypsilophodon, but this is uncertain.
[edit] References
- Barrett, P.M., Butler, R.J., and Knoll, F. 2005. Small-bodied ornithischian dinosaurs from the Middle Jurassic of Sichuan, China. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 25(4):823-834.
- Xiaosaurus in the Dinosaur Encyclopaedia at Dino Russ's Lair
- DinoDictionary.com's entry for Xiaosaurus
