Ricardoestesia
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Richardoestesia Temporal range: Late Cretaceous, 76.5–66 Ma |
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| Tooth of cf. R. gilmorei with close up of denticles | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | Saurischia |
| Suborder: | Theropoda |
| Clade: | Coelurosauria |
| Genus: |
†Richardoestesia Currie, Rigby & Sloan, 1990 |
| Type species | |
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†Richardoestesia gilmorei Currie, Rigby & Sloan, 1990 |
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| Species | |
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Richardoestesia is a medium-sized (~100 kg) genus of theropod dinosaur from the late Cretaceous Period of what is now North America. It currently contains two species, R. gilmorei and R. isosceles.
The holotype specimen of Richardoestesia gilmorei (NMC 343) consists of the pair of lower jaws found in the upper Judith River Group, dating from the Campanian age, about 75 million years ago. The jaws are slender and rather long, 193 millimeter, but the teeth are small and very finely serrated with five to six denticles per millimeter. The serration density is a distinctive trait of the species.
In 2001, Julia Sankey named a second species: Richardoestesia isosceles, based on a tooth, LSUMGS 489:6238, from the Texan Aguja Formation, which is of a longer and less recurved type. The teeth of R. isosceles have also been identified as crocodyliform in shape, possibly belonging to a sebecosuchian.
The jaws were found in 1917 by Charles Hazelius Sternberg and sons in the Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta at the Little Sandhill Creek site. In 1924 Charles Whitney Gilmore named Chirostenotes pergracilis and referred the jaws to this species. In the eighties it became clear that Chirostenotes was an oviraptosaur to which the long jaws could not have belonged. Therefore in 1990 Phillip Currie, John Keith Rigby and Robert Evan Sloan named a separate species: Richardoestesia gilmorei. The genus is named for Richard Estes, to honor his important work on small vertebrates and especially theropod teeth of the Late Cretaceous. The naming authors actually intended to use the spelling Ricardoestesia, Ricardus being the normal latinisation of "Richard". However, except in one overlooked figure caption, the editors of the paper altered the spelling to include the 'h'.[1] Ironically, in 1991 George Olshevsky in a species list also used the spelling Richardoestesia, and indicated Ricardoestesia to be the misspelling, unaware that the original authors actually intended the name to be spelled this way. As a result, under ICZN rules, he acted as "first revisor" choosing between the two spelling variants of the original publication and inadvertently made the misspelt name official. Subsequently, the original authors have adopted the spelling Richardoestesia. The specific name honors Gilmore.
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