Lexovisaurus
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Lexovisaurus Temporal range: Middle - Late Jurassic, 164.7 Ma |
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| Vertebrae and spike, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | †Ornithischia |
| Suborder: | †Stegosauria |
| Genus: |
†Lexovisaurus Hoffstetter, 1957 |
| Species: | †L. durobrivensis |
| Binomial name | |
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Lexovisaurus durobrivensis (Hulke, 1887 [originally Omosaurus]) |
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Lexovisaurus is a genus of stegosaur from mid-to-Late Jurassic Europe, 164.7 mya. Fossils of limb bones and armor fragments have been found in middle to late Jurassic-aged strata of England and France.
In the early 1880s collector Alfred Nicholson Leeds acquired a skeleton of a dinosaur excavated at a small brick pit at the hamlet of Tanholt, close to Eye, Cambridgeshire. In September 1885 the remains were shown to paleontologist Henry Woodward whose notes form the first documentation on the subject. Later it was mistakenly assumed the find had been made at the industrial brick pits at Fletton, the usual source of Leeds' specimens. In 1887 the fossil was described by John Whitaker Hulke and named as a new species of the stegosaurian Omosaurus: Omosaurus durobrivensis. The specific name referred to the old Roman town of Durobrivae. On 30 May 1892 the specimen was bought by the British Museum of Natural History.
The holotype, BMNH R1989, was found in the Peterborough Member of the Oxford Clay Formation, more especially the Kosmoceras jason biozone dating from the middle Callovian. Hulke mistakenly assumed a provenance from the younger Kimmeridge Clay Formation. It consists of a sacrum, of five vertebrae, and two ilia. Other bones were referred to the species, among them two plates thought to be part of the dermal armour. However, on 22 August 1888 Othniel Charles Marsh visited Leeds' collection at Eyebury and recognised these elements as belonging to a giant fish, in 1889 by Arthur Smith Woodward named Leedsichthys. The plates are in fact part of the latter's skull roof.
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