Pinacosaurus
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Pinacosaurus Temporal range: Late Cretaceous,80–75 Ma |
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| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | †Ornithischia |
| Family: | †Ankylosauridae |
| Subfamily: | †Ankylosaurinae |
| Genus: |
†Pinacosaurus Gilmore, 1933 |
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Pinacosaurus ("plank lizard") is a genus of medium-sized ankylosaur dinosaurs that lived from the late Santonian to the late Campanian stages of the late Cretaceous Period (roughly 80–75 million years ago), in Mongolia and China.
The type species Pinacosaurus grangeri was named in 1933. Pinacosaurus mephistocephalus named in 1999, is a second possibly valid species, differing from the type species in details of the skull armour. Of Pinacosaurus grangeri many skeletons have been found, more than of any other ankylosaur. These predominantly consist of juveniles that perhaps lived in herds roaming the desert landscape of their habitat.
Pinacosaurus was about five metres long and weighed up to two tonnes. Its body was flat and low-slung but not as heavily built as in some other members of the Ankylosaurinae. The head was protected by bone tiles, hence its name. Each nostril was formed as a large depression pierced by between three and five smaller holes, the purpose of which is uncertain. A smooth beak bit off low-growing plants that were sliced by rows of small teeth and then swallowed to be processed by the enormous hind gut. Neck, back and tail were protected by an armour of keeled osteoderms. The animal could also actively defend itself by means of a tail club.
The American Museum of Natural History sponsored several Central Asiatic Expeditions to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia in the 1920s. Among the many paleontological finds from the "Flaming Cliffs" of the Djadokhta Formation in Shabarakh Usu were the original specimens of Pinacosaurus, found by Walter Wallis Granger in 1923. In 1933, Charles Whitney Gilmore described a right ilium and a tail vertebra, without yet naming the animal. In a later publication of the same year, he named and described the type species Pinacosaurus grangeri. The generic name is derived from Greek πίναξ, pinax, "plank", in reference to the small rectangular scutes covering the head. The specific name honours Granger, who accompanied the 1923 expedition as a paleontologist.
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