Episode 228 is all about Gigantspinosaurus, a stegosaur (not a spinosaur) with large shoulder spines.

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In this episode, we discuss:

News:

• The day that wiped out the dinosaurs was captured in a 1.3m layer of flood water, fossilized fish, and raining tektites source
• According to the New Yorker, we can expect to see many dinosaur fossils that were killed by the asteroid in future articles source
• Several museums are working together to excavate near the Jurassic Mile in Wyoming source
• A man found a Spinosaurus tooth while running erands in Japan source
• The Discovery Center of Idaho in Boise is installing Tinker, a juvenile T. rex cast source
• The Antarctic Dinosaurs exhibit is now at LA’s Natural History Museum with Cryolophosaurus and Glacialisaurus source
• A Jurassic Park fan created a 6 minute stop motion short called Indomation featuring an Indoraptor toy and wooden artist manikins source

The dinosaur of the day: Gigantspinosaurus

• Stegosaur that lived in the Late Jurassic in what is now Sichuan, China
• Holotype is of an adult and included a partial skeleton of a subadult, with lower jaws (no skull), hind feet, and end of the tail, as well as plates, spines, and scutes
• Also found a skin impression from the left shoulder
• Medium-sized, estimated to be 14 ft (4.2 m) long and weighed 1,500 lb (700 kg)
• Had large shoulder spines, twice as long as the shoulder blades, and small plates on its back
• Had a large head, with 30 teeth in the lower jaw
• Had broad hips, and robust forelimbs
• Xing Lida and others described the skin impressions in 2008. They were pentagonal or hexagonal in shape
• Skeleton had a pathology in the left femur, probably from a bone tumor (based on CT scans)
• Type species is Gigantspinosaurus sichuanensis
• Name means “giant spined lizard”
• Species name refers to Sichuan
• Found in 1985 by Ouyang Hui, and described in 1986 by Gao Ruiqi and others, who thought it was Tuojiangosaurus
• Named in 1992 by Ouyang, in an abstract for a lecture
• Thought to be a nomen nudum until 2006 (the abstract had enough of a description)
• Tracy Ford wrote an article in 2006 that reconstructed Gigantspinosaurus (there had been other images of it published before)
• Ford said earlier representations had the shoulder spines upside down, his reconstruction had them going upwards
• Peng Guangzho and others in 2005 redescribed Gigantspinosaurus
• Susannah Maidment and Wei Guangbio in 2006 also found it was a valid taxon
• Can see Gigantspinosaurus at the Zigong Dinosaur Museum

Fun Fact: The “Age of the Dinosaurs” that we all imagine was mostly the Cretaceous Period.