''Gongpoquansaurus'' (meaning "Gongpoquan reptile") is an extinct

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial n ...

basal Basal or basilar is a term meaning ''base'', ''bottom'', or ''minimum''. Science * Basal (anatomy), an anatomical term of location for features associated with the base of an organism or structure * Basal (medicine), a minimal level that is nec ...

dinosaur Dinosaurs are a diverse group of reptiles of the clade Dinosauria. They first appeared during the Triassic period, between 243 and 233.23 million years ago (mya), although the exact origin and timing of the evolution of dinosaurs is t ...

that was not formally named until 2014, while the name was a ''

nomen nudum In taxonomy, a ''nomen nudum'' ('naked name'; plural ''nomina nuda'') is a designation which looks exactly like a scientific name of an organism, and may have originally been intended to be one, but it has not been published with an adequate des ...

'' for many years previously. It is known from IVPP V.11333, a partial

skull The skull is a bone protective cavity for the brain. The skull is composed of four types of bone i.e., cranial bones, facial bones, ear ossicles and hyoid bone. However two parts are more prominent: the cranium and the mandible. In humans, t ...

and

postcrania Postcrania (postcranium, adjective: postcranial) in zoology and vertebrate paleontology is all or part of the skeleton apart from the skull. Frequently, fossil remains, e.g. of dinosaurs or other extinct tetrapods, consist of partial or isolated s ...

l skeleton. It was collected in 1992 at locality IVPP 9208–21, from the

Albian The Albian is both an age of the geologic timescale and a stage in the stratigraphic column. It is the youngest or uppermost subdivision of the Early/Lower Cretaceous Epoch/ Series. Its approximate time range is 113.0 ± 1.0 Ma to 100.5 ± ...

Zhonggou Formation (

Xinminpu Group The Xīnmínbǎo Group () is a group of geological formations in north central China. They occur across a large depression between the Altai mountains of Mongolia to the north and the Qilian mountains of the Qinghai Plateau to the south, in the ...

), in Mazongshan,

Gansu Province Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibet ...

, China. The specimen was first described and named by Lü Junchang in

1997 File:1997 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The movie set of ''Titanic'', the highest-grossing movie in history at the time; ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'', is published; Comet Hale-Bopp passes by Earth and becomes one of ...

as the third species of ''

Probactrosaurus ''Probactrosaurus'' (meaning "before '' Bactrosaurus''") is an early herbivorous hadrosauroid iguanodont dinosaur. It lived in China during the Late Cretaceous period. Discovery and species In 1959 and 1960 a Soviet-Chinese expedition uncov ...

'', ''Probactrosaurus mazongshanensis''.Lü J., 1997, "A new Iguanodontidae (''Probactrosaurus mazongshanensis'' sp. nov.) from Mazongshan area, Gansu Province, China", In: Z. Dong (ed.), ''Sino-Japanese Silk Road Dinosaur Expedition''. China Ocean Press, Beijing pp. 27-47 Following its description, several studies found it to be less derived than the

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specimen( ...

of ''Probactrosaurus'' in relation to

Hadrosauridae Hadrosaurids (), or duck-billed dinosaurs, are members of the ornithischian family Hadrosauridae. This group is known as the duck-billed dinosaurs for the flat duck-bill appearance of the bones in their snouts. The ornithopod family, which incl ...

. Therefore, "Gongpoquansaurus" had been suggested, yet informally, as a replacement generic name. In 2014, the species was formally redescribed, and the describers erected ''Gongpoquansaurus''.

References

Early Cretaceous dinosaurs of Asia Iguanodonts Fossil taxa described in 2014 Taxa named by Peter Dodson Paleontology in Gansu Taxa named by Lü Junchang Ornithischian genera {{Ornithopod-stub