RE: Late Cretaceous titanosaur armor

[Josh Smith <smithjb@levee.wustl.edu>]

At 05:50 AM 2/20/2004, Tim Donovan wrote:

> "Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Tim Donovan (uwrk2@yahoo.com) wrote:
>
> >Why not?
>
> If armor was related to defense, it is possible that relatively small 
> titanosaurs such as Saltasaurus needed it whereas more massive taxa did 
> not. I don't think Paralititan or Argentinosaurus were armored. 
> Alamosaurus may have been the largest titanosaur of the late 
> Maastrichtian. It is probably known from as much material as European or 
> Malagasy taxa but no armor has been found.

Hard to say if _Paralititan_ or _Argentinosaurus_ were armored based on the 
available data.  We have not recovered any sauropod dermal material from 
Bahariya so far, and there are no osteoderms preserved with CGM 81119, the 
holotype of _Paralititan_ (and it appears there won't be any associated 
with this particular specimen...in 2001 we expanded the quarry seven times 
its original size and found no additional material).   There is a detailed 
osteology of CGM 81119 forthcoming (should be submitted in a month or so) 
that examines some of the "mystery bones" we got out of the type locality 
quarry....but it doesn't appear that any of the strange fragmentary 
elements that we found are dermal.

-Josh


------
Dr. Joshua B. Smith
Assistant Professor of Geology
Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences
Washington University
1 Brookings Drive
Campus Box 1169
108 Wilson Hall
St. Louis, MO  63130-4899
Office: 314.935.7033
FAX: 314.935.7361
smithjb@levee.wustl.edu
http://epsc.wustl.edu

Director, Bahariya Dinosaur Project
http://egyptdinos.org