''Pachysauriscus'' is a genus of plateosaurian

sauropodomorpha Sauropodomorpha ( ; from Greek, meaning "lizard-footed forms") is an extinct clade of long-necked, herbivorous, saurischian dinosaurs that includes the sauropods and their ancestral relatives. Sauropods generally grew to very large sizes, had lo ...

from the Late Triassic (

Norian The Norian is a division of the Triassic geological period, Period. It has the rank of an age (geology), age (geochronology) or stage (stratigraphy), stage (chronostratigraphy). It lasted from ~227.3 to Mya (unit), million years ago. It was prec ...

) of southern Germany. Although previously synonymized with ''

Plateosaurus ''Plateosaurus'' (probably meaning "broad lizard", often mistranslated as "flat lizard") is a genus of plateosaurid dinosaur that lived during the Late Triassic period, around 214 to 204 million years ago, in what is now Central and Northern Eu ...

'', a number of papers published since the early 2000s have cast doubt on this synonymy.

Taxonomy

''Pachysauriscus'' was originally named ''Pachysaurus'' by

Friedrich von Huene Baron Friedrich Richard von Hoyningen-Huene (22 March 1875 – 4 April 1969) was a German nobleman paleontologist who described a large number of dinosaurs, more than anyone else in 20th-century Europe. He studied a range of Permo-Carbonife ...

in his 1908 monograph on

Triassic The Triassic ( ; sometimes symbolized 🝈) is a geologic period and system which spans 50.5 million years from the end of the Permian Period 251.902 million years ago ( Mya), to the beginning of the Jurassic Period 201.4 Mya. The Triassic is t ...

dinosaurs from Europe. Two nominal species were described in the 1908 monograph, the type species ''P. ajax'' and ''P. magnus''. Two more ''Pachysaurus'' species were named in a 1932 paper, ''P. wetzeli'' (also spelled as ''P. wetzelianus'') and ''P. giganteus''. The name ''Pachysaurus'' was later found to have been used for a monitor lizard, so Kuhn (1959) provided the replacement name ''Pachysauriscus''. For his part, von Huene (1961) replaced ''Pachysaurus'' with ''Pachysaurops'', in which case ''Pachysaurops'' is a junior objective synonym of ''Pachysauriscus''.Regalado Fernández, O. R.; Stöhr, H.; Kästle, B.; Werneburg, I. (2023). Diversity and taxonomy of the Late Triassic sauropodomorphs (Saurischia, Sauropodomorpha) stored in the Palaeontological Collection of Tübingen, Germany, historically referred to ''Plateosaurus''. ''European Journal of Taxonomy'' 913: 1–88. doi:10.5852/ejt.2023.913.2375.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q6056807 Sauropodomorpha Dinosaur genera Norian dinosaurs Taxa named by Oskar Kuhn Fossil taxa described in 1959 Dinosaurs of Germany