MEANING: Chestnut tree dragon
PERIOD: Early Jurassic
CONTINENT: Asia
Lishulong is a basal sauropodomorph from the Early Jurassic. Typical of the sauropodomorphs of that time, Lishulong was a bipedal herbivore with a proportionately small head atop a long neck. Its teeth and neck suggest it likely fed on both ground-level and mid-height vegetation. Lishulong measured around 11 m in length, and weighed about 3 t.
Abstract from paper: The Lower Jurassic Lufeng Formation of China has long been recognized for its diverse early-diverging sauropodomorph dinosaurs, with eight genera and ten species, representing more than half the Laurasian records. In this paper, we describe a new genus and species of non-sauropodan sauropodomorph, Lishulong wangi gen. et sp. nov., from Yunnan Province in southwestern China. This new taxon is represented by a partial skeleton including the skull and nine articulated cervical vertebrae, which differs from other Lufeng forms in both cranial and cervical characteristics. It bears several autapomorphies of the nasal process, the maxillary neurovascular foramen, and the cervical neural spine. Phylogenetic analysis reveals that Lishulong is an early-diverging member of the Sauropodiformes, and the sister-taxon of Yunnanosaurus. Elucidating the novel osteology of Lishulong, it possessed the largest sauropodomorph cranial material currently identified from the Lufeng Formation, not only enriches the diversity of the Lufeng dinosaur assemblage, but also enhances our understanding of the character evolution in early-diverging sauropodiforms. Furthermore, information about paleobiogeographic distributions indicates that Early Jurassic sauropodomorphs, especially Chinese taxa, have maintained multiple dispersions and exchanges within Pangaea.
Lishulong is from the Jurassic. The Jurassic is a geologic period that spanned from the end of the Triassic, 201 million y ears ago, to the beginning of the Cretaceous, 145 million years ago. It is the middle period of the Mesozoic Era. The start of the Jurassic was marked by the major Triassic-Jurassic extinction event. The end, however, has no clear boundary with the Cretaceous. By the beginning of the Jurassic, Pangea had begun rifting into two landmasses: Laurasia and Gondwana, and the climate was warm with no ice caps. Life on land was dominated by dinosaurs, and the first birds appeared, evolving from a branch of theropods. The oceans were inhabited by marine reptiles, while pterosaurs were the dominant flying vertebrates.
Lishulong is a sauropodomorph. Sauropodomorpha is a group long-necked, herbivorous, saurischian dinosaurs that includes the sauropods and their ancestral relatives. Sauropods generally grew to very large sizes, had long necks and tails, were quadrupedal, and became the largest animals to ever walk the Earth. The prosauropods, which preceded the sauropods, were smaller and often able to walk on two legs. The sauropodomorphs were the dominant terrestrial herbivores throughout much of the Mesozoic Era, from their origins in the Late Triassic until their extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.
Sauropodomorphs had a light, tiny skull on the end of a long neck and a counterbalancing long tail. These adaptations gave them access to high tree foliage. The earliest known sauropodomorphs were small and slender, but by the end of the Triassic, they were the largest dinosaurs of their time, and throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous they continued growing. They were initially bipedal, but as their size increased they evolved a four-legged gait adapted only to walking slowly on land. The early sauropodomorphs were most likely omnivores as they were only recently diverged from the carnivorous theropods.