''Bellusaurus'' (meaning "Beautiful lizard", from

Vulgar Latin Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal Register (sociolinguistics), registers of Latin spoken from the Crisis of the Roman Republic, Late Roman Republic onward. Through time, Vulgar Latin would evolve ...

''bellus'' 'beautiful' (

masculine Masculinity (also called manhood or manliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles associated with men and boys. Masculinity can be theoretically understood as socially constructed, and there is also evidence that some behaviors con ...

form) and

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

''sauros'' 'lizard') was a small short-necked

sauropod Sauropoda (), whose members are known as sauropods (; from '' sauro-'' + '' -pod'', 'lizard-footed'), is a clade of saurischian ('lizard-hipped') dinosaurs. Sauropods had very long necks, long tails, small heads (relative to the rest of their bo ...

dinosaur Dinosaurs are a diverse group of reptiles of the clade Dinosauria. They first appeared during the Triassic period, between 243 and 233.23 million years ago (mya), although the exact origin and timing of the evolution of dinosaurs is t ...

from the Middle

Jurassic The Jurassic ( ) is a Geological period, geologic period and System (stratigraphy), stratigraphic system that spanned from the end of the Triassic Period million years ago (Mya) to the beginning of the Cretaceous Period, approximately Mya. The J ...

which measured about long. Its fossils were found in

Shishugou Formation The Shishugou Formation () is a geological formation in Xinjiang, China. Its strata date back to the Late Jurassic period. Dinosaur remains are among the fossils that have been recovered from the formation.Weishampel, David B; et al. (2004). "Din ...

rocks in the northeastern Junggar Basin in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

Discovery and naming

The type and only known species is ''Bellusaurus sui'', formally described by

Dong Zhiming Dong Zhiming (Chinese: 董枝明, Pinyin: ''Dǒng Zhimíng''; born January 1937) is a Chinese vertebrate paleontologist formerly employed at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing. He began working at the ...

in 1991. The remains of ''Bellusaurus'' were found in the

in the northeastern Junggar Basin in

. Seventeen individuals were found in a single quarry, suggesting that a herd had been killed in a flash flood. Some features suggest they may have all been juveniles. ''Bellusaurus sui'' was derived from the Latin ''bellus'' meaning small, delicate, and beautiful, as these sauropods were small and lightly built. The specific name, ''sui'', was named in honor of Senior Preparator Youling Sui, a notable restorer of dinosaurs remains. ''Bellusaurus'' was the last restoration undertaken by Mr. Sui.

Description

It is unknown if the material representing ''Bellusaurus'' is from juvenile specimens. Juvenile characteristics of dinosaurs have been noted by Galton in 1982 of stegosaur growth, whose study would suggest that the group of small ''Bellusaurus'' sauropods were juveniles that were subjected to a single catastrophe resulting in the mass death assemblage seen from this discovery. Because of the uncertainty of the specimens age, it could be difficult to place the species into a specific taxonomic assignment due to having unstable morphological characteristics.

References

External links

''Bellusaurus''
in the Dino Directory Macronarians Middle Jurassic dinosaurs of Asia Jurassic China Fossils of China Paleontology in Xinjiang Fossil taxa described in 1990 Taxa named by Dong Zhiming {{Jurassic-reptile-stub