Your Friends The Titanosaurs: Yeneen houssayi

What do you get the formation that has five established titanosaur species and a couple of ne'er-do-wells? A sixth titanosaur, of course!

All joking aside, it's misleading to think of "Titanosauria" as a relatively small-scale group like Diplodocidae or Brachiosauridae when it's really a massive, sprawling complex including multiple distinct lineages that essentially monopolized all things sauropod in the Late Cretaceous. We talk of the Morrison Formation having diplodocids and dicraeosaurids and camarasaurids and brachiosaurids and whatever else, and that may sound more impressive than the Bajo de la Carpa Formation having six different titanosaurs. "What? You need all those titanosaurs?" "All those titanosaurs" are functionally replacing each of those smaller clades of the Morrison, as well as apparently just about everything else large and herbivorous. It's just the relationships and smaller divisions are still fuzzy. Eventually, we'll have a better grasp. But enough philosophy! Let's bring on today's guest, Yeneen houssayi. (And thank you to Alberta Claw and Stephen Poropat for supplying me with the paper!)

Silvisaurus condrayi

You wait long enough, and history starts to pile up, like falling snow (only history doesn't melt away and has a way of churning back to the surface). In paleontology, we've just passed two centuries with Megalosaurus (1824) and Iguanodon (1825). I was thinking about the topic of this post and how it was a relatively recent name, even though it felt old, but then realized that 1960 is not quite as recent as it was when I first read about Silvisaurus in the mid-1980s. I'm not tracking stats to any great degree, but it's probably safe to say there aren't a lot of people reading this who were mid-career when the scientific description of Silvisaurus condrayi was published.