Horshamosaurus
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Horshamosaurus Temporal range: Barremian Cretaceous |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Archosauria |
| Superorder: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | Ornithischia |
| Suborder: | Thyreophora |
| Infraorder: | Ankylosauria |
| Genus: |
Horshamosaurus Blows, 2015 |
| species | |
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Horshamosaurus is a genus of herbivorous ankylosaurian dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of England.
In 1985, at the marl quarry of the Rudgwick Brickworks Company near Rudgwick in West Sussex, fossils were dug up of dinosaurs. These were secured by two volunteers of the Horsham Museum: Morris Zdzalek and Sylvia Standing. After 1988, the finds were exhibited in the museum as Iguanodon bones. Subsequently neurologist William T. Blows, an amateur paleontologist who already had extensively published on the subject of armoured dinosaurs, determined that the bones were not iguanodontian but instead represented ankylosaurian remains.
In 1996, on basis of the finds, a new species of the genus Polacanthus, Polacanthus rudgwickensis, was named and described by Blows. The specific name refers to the provenance from Rudgwick.
The material, holotype HORSM 1988.1546, was found in a layer of gray-green marl beds of the lower Weald Clay dating from the Barremian age, over 125 million years old. It is fragmentary and includes two incomplete dorsal vertebrae, part of a front tail vertebra, bone fragments of other vertebrae, a partial left scapulocoracoid of the shoulder girdle, the distal end of a humerus, a nearly complete right tibia, rib fragments, and two osteoderms.
In 2015, Blows made it a separate genus Horshamosaurus, the generic name referring to Horsham. Its type species is Polacanthus rudgwickensis. The combinatio nova is Horshamosaurus rudgwickensis.
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