Morelladon
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Morelladon Temporal range: Early Cretaceous, 130 Ma |
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| Dorsal vertebrae | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | †Ornithischia |
| Suborder: | †Ornithopoda |
| Clade: | †Styracosterna |
| Genus: |
Morelladon Gasulla et al., (2015) |
| Species: | M. beltrani |
| Binomial name | |
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Morelladon beltrani Gasulla et al., (2015) |
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Morelladon is an extinct genus of herbivorous styracosternan ornithopod dinosaur, that lived during the Early Cretaceous of Spain, around 130 million years ago.
In 2013, teams of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, at the Mas de Sabaté (CMP-MS) site of the Mas de la Parreta quarry at Morella discovered a skeleton of a euornithopod. The fossil was prepared by Juan Miguel Soler, Miguel Ángel Aguilar, Jesús Royo and Manuel Domingo García.
In 2015, the type species Morelladon beltrani was named and described by José Miguel Gasulla, Fernando Escaso, Iván Narváez, Francisco Ortega and José Luis Sanz. The generic name combines a reference to Morella with Greek ὀδών, odoon, "tooth". The specific name honours Victor Beltrán, the owner of the Vega del Moll S.A. Company exploiting the quarries, for his cooperation with the scientific research.
The holotype, CMP-MS-03, was found in a layer of the Arcillas de Morella Formation traditionally dated to the early Aptian, but according to recent palynological research perhaps dating from the late Barremian. It consists of a partial skeleton lacking the skull. It contains a right dentary tooth, seven back vertebrae, fragments of the neural spines of back vertebrae, two rib pieces, a sacrum, two chevrons, and a right shinbone.
Morelladon was one of eighteen dinosaur taxa from 2015 to be described in open access or free-to-read journals.
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