RE: Majungatholus

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

> From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu]On Behalf Of
> Larry Dunn
> Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 1999 5:04 PM
> To: dinosaur@usc.edu
> Subject: Re: Majungatholus
>
>
> --- Timothy Williams <twilliams_alpha@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > As you say, the skull fragment was thought to come
> > from the dome of a
> > pachycephalosaur, but new material from Madagascar
> > proves it comes from the
> > skull roof of a thick-headed abelisaurid theropod
> > related to _Carnotaurus_.
>
> I know this was the word on M., but has its close
> relationship with Carnotaurus been *established* yet?
> Is it even definitely an abelisaurid?  Last I recall,
> from the paper in (um, NATURE?), it was not.  But I
> may (dramatic music) be mistaken.
>

Cue that dramatic music: Sampson et al. (Science 280: 1048-1051) established
quite well that _Majungatholus_ was an abelisaurid close to _Carnotaurus_.

What you may be thinking of was the question of carcharodontosaur-abelisaur
relationships, which is briefly touched upon in that paper.  As many have
observed, there are a fair number of cranial similarities between
_Carcharodontosaurus_ and _Giganotosaurus_ on the one hand (one pretty BIG
hand, to hold both of those... :-) and abelisaurids, esp. _Abelisaurus_, on
the other.  Coupled with the Gondwanan diversity of both clades, this has
led some (especially Novas) to suspect that these two clades are closely
related.  On the gripping hand (Niven & Pournelle reference, sorry), the
postcranial anatomy of _Giganotosaurus_ is very much of the allosaur mode,
while that of _Carnotaurus_ and what is known of _Majungatholus) is
considerably different from allosaurs, and is more similar to
_Ceratosaurus_.

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.inform.umd.edu/SCHOLAR/programs/elt.html
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796