Tornieria
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Tornieria Temporal range: Late Jurassic, 150 Ma |
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| Restoration of a T. africana skull (bottom right), alongside skulls of other diplodocoids. | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | Saurischia |
| Suborder: | †Sauropodomorpha |
| Clade: | †Neosauropoda |
| Family: | †Diplodocidae |
| Subfamily: | †Diplodocinae |
| Genus: |
†Tornieria Sternfeld, 1911 |
| Species: | †T. africana |
| Binomial name | |
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Tornieria africana Fraas, 1908 [originally Gigantosaurus] |
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| Synonyms | |
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Gigantosaurus africanus Fraas, 1908 |
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Gigantosaurus africanus Fraas, 1908
Tornieria ("for Tornier") is a genus of diplodocid sauropod dinosaur from Late Jurassic of Tanzania. It has a convoluted taxonomic history.
In 1907, German paleontologist Eberhard Fraas who was working the Tendaguru Beds in German East Africa (presently Tanzania), discovered two sauropod specimens at a single site ("Quarry A"). The two individuals, designated "Skeleton A" and "Skeleton B", each represented a different sauropod species. In 1908 he named these respectively Gigantosaurus africanus ("African giant lizard") and G. robustus ("Robust giant lizard"). A third, unrelated African species, "Gigantosaurus" dixeyi, was named by Haughton in 1928, and has since been reassigned to Malawisaurus.
However, the name Gigantosaurus had already been used for the European sauropod Gigantosaurus megalonyx Seeley, 1869. Fraas, not intending to place his species in the same genus as this English form, had believed that the name was available, since at the time the latter species was considered to be a junior synonym of Ornithopsis and Seeley in his opinion had not provided a sufficient description anyway. Another German paleontologist, Richard Sternfeld, renamed the Tanzanian sauropod Tornieria in 1911, making the two species Tornieria africana and T. robusta. The generic name honours the German herpetologist Gustav Tornier.
A re-evaluation of Tornieria in 1922 by Werner Janensch concluded that one species, T. africana, was actually an African species of the North American sauropod genus Barosaurus: Barosaurus africanus. The other African species, T. robusta, later turned out to belong to a titanosaur. The titanosaur species for a time was called Tornieria, but this was incorrect as T. africana had been the type species. It needed a generic name of its own and this was provided in 1991 when Rupert Wild renamed it Janenschia.
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