Plateosaurus is a genus of plateosaurid dinosaur that lived during the Late Triassic period, around 214 to 204 million years ago. Currently, there are three valid species, P. trossingensis, longiceps, and P. gracilis. The abundance of its fossils in Swabia, Germany, has led to the nickname Schwäbischer Lindwurm.
About Plateosaurus in brief
Plateosaurus is a genus of plateosaurid dinosaur that lived during the Late Triassic period, around 214 to 204 million years ago. Discovered in 1834 by Johann Friedrich Engelhardt and described three years later by Hermann von Meyer, Plateosaurus was the fifth named dinosaur genus that is still considered valid. Currently, there are three valid species, P. trossingensis, longiceps, and P. gracilis. However, others have been assigned in the past, and there is no broad consensus on the species taxonomy of Plateosaurus. The abundance of its fossils in Swabia, Germany, has led to the nickname Schwäbischer Lindwurm. The animal was a bipedal herbivore with a small skull on a long, flexible neck, sharp but plump plant-crushing teeth, powerful hind limbs, short but muscular arms and grasping hands with large claws on three fingers. Commonly, the animals lived for at least 12 to 20 years, but the maximum life span is not known. Much of the material found its way to the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, where much of it was destroyed during World War II. Some researchers proposed theories that were later shown to conflict with geological and palaeontological evidence, but have become the paradigm of public opinion. Since 1980 the taxonomy, taphonomy, biomechanics, andPalaeobiology of Plate dinosaurs have been re-studied in detail. Since then, remains of well over 100 individuals have been discovered at various locations throughout Europe.
Material assigned to Plateosaurus has been found at over 50 localities in Germany, Switzerland and France. The second major German locality was a quarry in Trossingen in the Black Forest in the early 20th century. In 2019, the ICZN replaced the former type species P. engelhardti with P. trossedensis due to the former being undiagnostic. It was not one of the three genera used by Owen to define the group, because at the time, it was poorly known and difficult to identify as a dinosaur. It is now among the dinosaurs best known to science: over 100 skeletons have been found, some of them nearly complete. Unusually for a dinosaur, Plateosaurus showed strong developmental plasticity: instead of having a fairly uniform adult size, fully grown individuals were between 4. 8 and 10 metres long and weighed between 600 and 4,000 kilograms. Some of the Plateosaurus material was assigned to P. longiceps by Otto Jaekel in 1914. The material was destroyed in 1944, when the Natural Museum of Stuttgart was burnt to ground after an Allied bombing raid. The large number of large specimens from Swabian Quenstedtia had already caused German palAEontologist Friedrich August Quenststedt to nickname the animal SchwäBischer LindWurm, which means ‘the animal of the Swabians’
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This page is based on the article Plateosaurus published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
