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Huanansaurus, new oviraptorid from Late Cretaceous of China (free pdf)



Ben Creisler
bcreisler@gmail.com

A new paper in open access:


Huanansaurus ganzhouensis

Junchang Lü, Hanyong Pu, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, Li Xu, Huali Chang,
Yuhua Shang, Di Liu, Yuong-Nam Lee, Martin Kundrát & Caizhi Shen
(2015)
A New Oviraptorid Dinosaur (Dinosauria: Oviraptorosauria) from the
Late Cretaceous of Southern China and Its Paleobiogeographical
Implications.
Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 11490
doi:10.1038/srep11490
http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150702/srep11490/full/srep11490.html

The Ganzhou area of Jiangxi Province, southern China is becoming one
of the most productive oviraptorosaurian localities in the world. A
new oviraptorid dinosaur was unearthed from the uppermost Upper
Cretaceous Nanxiong Formation of Ganzhou area. It is characterized by
an anterodorsally sloping occiput and quadrate (a feature shared with
Citipati), a circular supratemporal fenestra that is much smaller than
the lower temporal fenestra, and a dentary in which the dorsal margin
above the external mandibular fenestra is strongly concave ventrally.
The position of the anteroventral corner of the external naris in
relation to the posterodorsal corner of the antorbital fenestra
provides new insight into the craniofacial evolution of
oviraptorosaurid dinosaurs. A phylogenetic analysis recovers the new
taxon as closely related to the Mongolian Citipati. Six oviraptorid
dinosaurs from the Nanxiong Formation (Ganzhou and Nanxiong) are
distributed within three clades of the family. Each of the three
clades from the Nanxiong Formation has close relatives in Inner
Mongolia and Mongolia, and in both places each clade may have had a
specific diet or occupied a different ecological niche. Oviraptorid
dinosaurs were geographically widespread across Asia in the latest
Cretaceous and were an important component of terrestrial ecosystems
during this time.