''Tambatitanis'' (meaning "Tamba giant", after Tamba, the name given to the northwest of Kansai, Japan is an extinct

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

titanosauriform Macronaria is a clade of sauropod dinosaurs. Macronarians are named after the large diameter of the nasal opening of their skull, known as the external naris, which exceeded the size of the orbit, the skull opening where the eye is located (hence ...

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 Early Cretaceous (probably early

Albian The Albian is both an age of the geologic timescale and a stage in the stratigraphic column. It is the youngest or uppermost subdivision of the Early/Lower Cretaceous Epoch/ Series. Its approximate time range is 113.0 ± 1.0 Ma to 100.5 ± 0 ...

) of Japan. It is known from a single

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specime ...

, ''Tambatitanis amicitiae'', which is known from the Sasayama Group. It was probably around long and its mass was estimated at some . It was a basal titanosauriform and possibly belonged to the

Euhelopodidae Euhelopodidae is a family of sauropod 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 or ...

. The

holotype A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of sever ...

was collected between 2006 and 2010.H. Saegusa, S. Tanaka, T. Ikeda, T. Matsubara, H. Frutani and K. Handa. 2008. On the occurrence of sauropod and some associated vertebrate fossils from the Lower Cretaceous Sasayama Group of Hyogo Prefecture, SW Japan. ''Journal of Fossil Research'' 41(1):2-12

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q17524002 Early Cretaceous dinosaurs of Asia Fossil taxa described in 2014 Fossils of Japan