''Transylvanosaurus'' (meaning "lizard from across the forest") is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

genus of

rhabdodontid Rhabdodontidae is a family of herbivorous iguanodontian ornithopod dinosaurs whose earliest stem members appeared in the middle of the Lower Cretaceous. The oldest dated fossils of these stem members were found in the Barremian Castrillo de la R ...

ornithopod Ornithopoda () is a clade of ornithischian dinosaurs, called ornithopods (), that started out as small, bipedal running grazers and grew in size and numbers until they became one of the most successful groups of herbivores in the Cretaceous world ...

dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous (

Maastrichtian The Maastrichtian () is, in the ICS geologic timescale, the latest age (uppermost stage) of the Late Cretaceous Epoch or Upper Cretaceous Series, the Cretaceous Period or System, and of the Mesozoic Era or Erathem. It spanned the interval from ...

) Hateg Basin of

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...

. The type species is ''Transylvanosaurus platycephalus'', known from a fragmentary skull.

Discovery and naming

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 several ...

specimen, LPB (FGGUB) R.2070, was found in 2007 in the ‘Pui Beds’ in the Bărbat River Valley section of Haţeg Basin,

Hunedoara County Hunedoara County () is a county ('' județ'') of Romania, in Transylvania, with its capital city at Deva. The county is part of the Danube–Criș–Mureș–Tisa Euroregion. Name In Hungarian, it is known as , in German as , and in Slovak as ...

, Romania. This locality is dated to the middle

age of the

Late Cretaceous The Late Cretaceous (100.5–66 Ma) is the younger of two epochs into which the Cretaceous Period is divided in the geologic time scale. Rock strata from this epoch form the Upper Cretaceous Series. The Cretaceous is named after ''creta'', the ...

period. It consists of a fragmentary skull, including the articulated basicranium and articulated frontals. In 2022, ''Transylvanosaurus platycephalus'' was described as a new genus and species of rhabdodontid ornithopod dinosaurs by Felix J. Augustin, Dylan Bastiaans, Mihai D. Dumbravă, and Zoltán Csiki-Sava based on these remains. The generic name, "''Transylvanosaurus''", is derived from the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

words "trans", meaning "across" and "silva", meaning "forest", and the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

word "sauros", meaning "lizard" (σαύρος). The generic name references Transylvania, the region that contains the type locality of the genus in the Haţeg Basin . The specific name, "''platycephalus''", combines the Greek words "platys" (πλατύς), meaning wide, and "kephale" (κεφαλῇ), meaning head, in reference to the unusual width of the skull compared to related taxa.

Classification

In their

phylogenetic analyses In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek φυλή/ φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups o ...

, Augustin ''et al''. (2022) recovered ''Transylvanosaurus'' as a member of the

Rhabdodontidae Rhabdodontidae is a family of herbivorous iguanodontian ornithopod dinosaurs whose earliest stem members appeared in the middle of the Lower Cretaceous. The oldest dated fossils of these stem members were found in the Barremian Castrillo de la R ...

. The

cladogram A cladogram (from Greek ''clados'' "branch" and ''gramma'' "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an evolutionary tree because it does not show how ancestors are related to d ...

below displays the results of their phylogenetic analyses. Despite these results, Augustin ''et al.'' propose "particularly close relationships" with ''Rhabdodon'' based on morphological comparisons.

References

Iguanodonts Late Cretaceous dinosaurs of Europe Maastrichtian life Cretaceous Romania Fossils of Romania Fossil taxa described in 2022 Ornithischian genera {{ornithopod-stub