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At last! Some sauropods enter the LRT.

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Overlooked no longer: the clade Sauropoda.
Learning about clade members now for the first time. Three have been added to the large reptile tree (LRT, 1291 taxa): Diplodocus, Camarasaurus and Brachiosaurus (Figs. 1, 4).

Figure 1. Several sauropod skulls to scale with DGS colors on the bones. Here are Shunosaurus, Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus.

Note:
the antorbital fossa is absent in derived taxa.

Figure 2. Family of Brachiosaurus illustration from A Dinosaur Year 1989 (flipped left to right). The original illustration hangs on the wall behind my computer monitor.

Note 2:
The palate of sauropods shows an increasing space allotted to the internal nares. That makes sense given the increased volumes of air passing in and out of the nares of these increasingly gigantic dinosaurs — a volume that has to be several times the volume of the dead air in that long sauropod throat.

Figure 3. Sauropodiform and sauropod palates, Yizhousaurus, Diplodocus, Camarasaurus and Brachiosaurus. The choanae (internal nares) get bigger in derived sauropods.

Other sauropod traits:

  1. Fingers reduced to single phalanx stubs below semi-tubular metatarsals. Only digit 1 retains an ungual and tracks show it was retroverted, dorsal side down, saving the point, oriented medially to posteriorly (Fig. 4).
  2. External nares dorsal with fragile to absent premaxillary ascending process (Fig. 1).
Figure 4. Reconstructions of manus and pes of Camarasaurus SMA0002 from Tschopp et al. 2015.

The LRT
divided dinosaurs into theropods and phytodinosaurs in 2011. Sauropodomorpha is a phytodinosaur clade, the sister clade of the clade Ornithischia (Fig. 5). Currently 5 taxa within the Phytodinosauria precede this split.

Figure 4. Subset of the LRT focusing on the Phytodinosauria. Three sauropods are added here.

More
on each of these sauropods will come shortly.

References
Tschopp E, Wings O, Frauenfelder T, and Brinkmann W 2015. Articulated bone sets of manus and pedes of Camarasaurus (Sauropoda, Dinosauria). Palaeontologia Electronica 18.2.44A: 1-65.


Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2018/09/20/at-last-some-sauropods-enter-the-lrt/


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