A huge dinosaur skull found in southern China appears to belong to an entirely new species, according to a group of paleontologists that studied the specimen.
Paleontologists found the fossilized skull in Yunnan Province’s Lufeng Dinosaur National Geopark in China. The group determined the skull belonged to a sauropodomorph—a group of dinosaurs that also includes giant herbivorous sauropods such as Brachiosaurus—albeit one entirely new to the scientific record.
The research team dubbed the animal Lishulong wangi—”lishu” from the Chinese spelling of chestnut tree, “long” in reference to a dragon, and “wangi” after a vertebrate paleontologist of the same name.
The team believes that Lishulong wangi may have grown up to 33 feet (10 meters) long. The team’s findings were published last month in PeerJ.
“Based on the current fossil records, Lishulong wangi is the largest sauropodomorph from the Early Jurassic epoch in China, and is considered morphologically mature,” the team wrote in the paper.
The team added that the animal has the largest skull of the known sauropodomorphs from the Lufeng formation, indicating that researchers may need to revisit related specifics to better understand the size of the animals in the group.
Zhang told LiveScience that the large dinosaur was probably a herbivore, and can be distinguished from its sister taxon—Yunnanosaurus—by its larger nostrils. The animal’s fossilized skull is about 15.75 inches (40 centimeters) long, beating the previously largest skull in the region (which belonged to a Jingshanosaurus specimen) by about two inches (5 cm).
The large skull is just the latest find out of China. In 2023, a team revealed a stupendous fossil of a mammal apparently preying on a beaked dinosaur; the previous year, a group of paleontologists published evidence of the opposite, in the form of a mammal’s foot inside a fossilized Microraptor.
In 2021, paleontologists published several fossil finds from the country, including the remains of a nesting oviraptor (complete with fossilized dinosaur eggs), the astonishing remnants of a dinosaur cloaca, and 500-million-year-old penis worms from Yunnan, the same province where paleontologists uncovered L. wangi.
The team suggested that the discovery of L. wangi could offer insights into the prevalence of the animal and its closest dinosaur relatives across Earth’s ancient supercontinent.
“The paleobiodiversity of early sauropodomorphs from Gondwana seems to decrease marginally after the Triassic-Jurassic boundary,” the researchers wrote. “Therefore, we hypothesize that non-sauropodan sauropodomorph genera survived and rapidly radiated in Laurasia, especially China.” In other words, early sauropodomorphs declined in Gondwana but thrived and diversified in Laurasia, especially China.
Though Lishulong wangi is not as large as some of the truly massive sauropods such as the titanosaurs, the animal still blows modern land animals out of the water er, land. The newly described fossil is now on display at the Lufeng World Dinosaur Valley museum.