Brachypodosaurus

Brachypodosaurus (meaning "short-footed lizard") is a dubious genus of dinosaur, possibly an ornithischian, from the Late Cretaceous Lameta Formation (Maastrichtian) in India.

The only remains discovered so far for this animal consist of a single fossil bone, excavated at the Chota Simla Hill near Jabalpur. In 1934, geologist Dhirendra Kishore Chakravarti, of the Geological Museum of the Banaras Hindu University, considered it a humerus, of a stegosaurian. He named it as the type species Brachypodosaurus gravis. The generic name is derived from Greek βραχύς, brachys, "short", and πούς, pous, "foot". The specific name gravis means "heavy" in Latin.^[1] Chakravarti hereby became the first local scientist to name a dinosaur.

The holotype is IM V9. The bone is over a foot long. Chakravarti based his identification of the element as a humerus on the presence of a large crest on the shaft, which he took for the deltopectoral crest. The status as a (dinosaurian) humerus is problematic. The bone is flat, has a crest on the other side of the shaft also, is not twisted around its longitudinal axis, is strongly constricted above and below the crests and lacks a clear caput or condyles. In any case, it lacks stegosaurian synapomorphies.^[2] On the assumption it might at least be some member of the Thyreophora, it has been considered a possible ankylosaurian, the ankylosaurs being a sister group of the Stegosauria that survived into the Late Cretaceous. Even then, however, it was considered a nomen dubium as so few remains of the animal have been found.^[3] In 2004, Matthew Lamanna e.a. considered it unlikely that any Ornithischia were present in the Maastrichtian of India.^[4] The other Late Cretaceous genus from India originally described as a stegosaur, Dravidosaurus, is also a nomen dubium based on plesiosaurian remains.

References