''Tapuiasaurus'' (meaning " Tapuia lizard") is a

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 ...

titanosaur Titanosaurs (or titanosaurians; members of the group Titanosauria) were a diverse group of sauropod dinosaurs, including genera from all seven continents. The titanosaurs were the last surviving group of long-necked sauropods, with taxa still th ...

which lived during the

Lower Cretaceous Lower may refer to: *Lower (surname) *Lower Township, New Jersey *Lower Receiver (firearms) *Lower Wick Gloucestershire, England See also *Nizhny Nizhny (russian: Ни́жний; masculine), Nizhnyaya (; feminine), or Nizhneye (russian: Ни́� ...

period (

Aptian The Aptian is an age in the geologic timescale or a stage in the stratigraphic column. It is a subdivision of the Early or Lower Cretaceous Epoch or Series and encompasses the time from 121.4 ± 1.0 Ma to 113.0 ± 1.0 Ma (million years ag ...

age) in what is now Minas Gerais,

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. Its fossils, including a partial

skeleton A skeleton is the structural frame that supports the body of an animal. There are several types of skeletons, including the exoskeleton, which is the stable outer shell of an organism, the endoskeleton, which forms the support structure inside ...

with a nearly complete

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 ...

, have been recovered from the

Quiricó Formation The Quiricó Formation is a geological formation of the Areado Group in Minas Gerais, Brazil whose strata date back to the Lower Cretaceous (Early Cretaceous).Sgarbi, 2000 Many occurrences of fossils are reported in the lacustrine deposits of the ...

of the

São Francisco Basin SAO or Sao may refer to: Places * Sao civilisation, in Middle Africa from 6th century BC to 16th century AD * Sao, a town in Boussé Department, Burkina Faso * Saco Transportation Center (station code SAO), a train station in Saco, Maine, U.S ...

Minas Gerais Minas Gerais () is a state in Southeastern Brazil. It ranks as the second most populous, the third by gross domestic product (GDP), and the fourth largest by area in the country. The state's capital and largest city, Belo Horizonte (literall ...

, eastern Brazil. This genus was named by Hussam Zaher, Diego Pol, Alberto B. Carvalho, Paulo M. Nascimento, Claudio Riccomini, Peter Larson, Rubén Juárez Valieri, Ricardo Pires Domingues, Nelson Jorge da Silva Jr. and Diógenes de Almeida Campos in 2011, and 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( ...

is ''Tapuiasaurus macedoi''.

Classification

''Tapuiasaurus'' was originally assigned to Nemegtosauridae by its original describers, but two subsequent cladistic analyses have recovered it as only distantly related to ''

Nemegtosaurus ''Nemegtosaurus'' (meaning 'Reptile from the Nemegt') was a sauropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Period of what is now Mongolia. It was named after the Nemegt Basin in the Gobi Desert, where the remains — a single skull — were found. T ...

'', with Wilson ''et al.'' (2016) recovering the genus outside the

Lithostrotia Lithostrotia is a clade of derived titanosaur sauropods that lived during the Early Cretaceous and Late Cretaceous. The group was defined by Upchurch ''et al.'' in 2004 as the most recent common ancestor of '' Malawisaurus'' and '' Saltasaurus' ...

, and Carballido ''et al.'' (2017) recovering it as closely related to the Gondwanan lithostrotians ''

Isisaurus ''Isisaurus'' (named after the Indian Statistical Institute) is a genus of titanosaurian dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Lameta Formation of India. The genus contains a single species, ''Isisaurus colberti''. Discovery and Naming The t ...

'' and '' Rapetosaurus''.Carballido, J.L.; Pol, D.; Otero, A.; Cerda, I.A.; Salgado, L.; Garrido, A.C.; Ramezani, J.; Cúneo, N.R.; Krause, J.M. (2017). "A new giant titanosaur sheds light on body mass evolution among sauropod dinosaurs". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 284 (1860): 20171219. .

References

Lithostrotians Aptian life Early Cretaceous dinosaurs of South America Cretaceous Brazil Fossils of Brazil Fossil taxa described in 2011 {{sauropodomorph-stub