Bonapartesaurus
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Bonapartesaurus Temporal range: Campanian–Maastrichtian Upper Cretaceous |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Sauropsida |
| Superorder: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | Ornithischia |
| Suborder: | Neornithischia |
| Infraorder: | Ornithopoda |
| Family: | Hadrosauridae |
| Subfamily: | Saurolophinae |
| Tribe: | Saurolophini |
| Genus: |
Bonapartesaurus Cruzado-Caballero & Powell, 2017 |
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Bonapartesaurus is an extinct genus of plant-eating ornithopod dinosaur belonging to Hadrosauridae, who lived in the area of the modern Argentina during the Upper Cretaceous.
The remains were excavated by the Argentine paleontologist Jaime Powell and collaborators in 1984 and described by him in 1987, where he identified the dinosaur remains as a possible "indeterminate lambeosaurine", comparing it mainly with the genera Hypacrosaurus and Barsboldia due to great size of the neural spines.
In 2010, Rubén D. Juárez Valieri and his team erected a new genus and hadrosaurid species called Willinakaqe salitralensis from different materials found in 2 different locations (Salitral Moreno and Islas Malvinas) of the Allen Formation, which are mostly housed in the collection of the Carlos Ameghino Provincial Museum, where the specimen was examined by Powell, and was made the paratype of this new genus, in addition to the holotype of Lapampasaurus as material attributed to W. salitralensis from the second locality and housed in the Provincial Museum of Natural History, in the province of La Pampa.
Later, the Spanish paleontologist Penélope Cruz-Caballero and the Argentine Rodolfo Coria reviewed the material attributed to the genus Willinakaqe in 2016, where they concluded that fossils may represent more than one taxon of hadrosaurid and that the characteristics used in the diagnosis would not be valid. Also, the specimen is not preserved in good condition in addition to being incomplete, and therefore non-diagnostic, degrading it to the status of "indeterminate Hadrosauridae" and becoming a Willinakaqe salitrensis in a nomina vana.
In 2017 Cruzado-Caballero and Powell reassign the paratype of W. salitralensis to its own genus and species, Bonapartesaurus rionegrensis, converting the former into a chimera of different hadrosaurids, and hence, an invalid name.
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Wikipedia