Your Friends The Titanosaurs, part 33.3: Alamosaurus of Texas and Mexico?

Having visited New Mexico and Utah (with side trips to Wyoming and Montana), we come now to more southerly Alamosaurus, concentrated in the Big Bend region of Texas. After a slow start Big Bend titanosaurs have attracted a lot of study, with numerous publications over the past quarter-century. There are also some less well-documents reports from elsewhere in Texas and across the border in Chihuahua, Mexico. We also have a little more on the question of whether or not we're dealing with just one species, and Tyrannosaurus makes yet another cameo.

This post marks the end of the main part of "Your Friends The Titanosaurs" (I can hardly believe it!) although we do have a few things to follow up with before calling it closed.

A view of the Perot Museum of Natural History mount (Dallas, Texas) emphasizing the neck. The original neck vertebrae are visible near floor level behind the torso of the mount. In the lower right a Tyrannosaurus rex has second thoughts. Photo by Louis Tanner from Garland, TX, USA, CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Aquilarhinus palimentus

I get to knock another notable fossil park off my list today with a new basal hadrosaur from Big Bend National Park. The NPS doesn't have a park covering the classic Upper Great Plains terrestrial Upper Cretaceous rocks, but it does have Big Bend, one of the best southern North American Upper Cretaceous areas known (to say nothing of its Lower Cretaceous and Cenozoic records). Our visitor today is the arch-snouted trowel-jawed Aquilarhinus palimentus.

But first, a brief note which connects to the history of this blog: "Lori" the Morrison troodontid has been officially described, as Hesperornithoides miessleri (Hartman et al. 2019). There's really no point in my writing anything about it, because the two lead authors (Scott Hartman and Mickey Mortimer) have their own blogs where they are covering it and I certainly couldn't add anything to them, so check them out!