{"id":559242,"date":"2026-08-05T00:50:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T00:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/559242\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T00:50:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T00:50:09","slug":"fossil-find-in-china-reveals-dinosaur-family-never-before-seen-in-east-asia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/559242\/","title":{"rendered":"Fossil Find in China Reveals Dinosaur Family Never Before Seen in East Asia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paleontologists working in southern China have identified a new species of sauropod dinosaur that appears to belong to a group never before documented anywhere in East Asia.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

An artist\u2019s impression of Yantaloong lini. Image credit: TotalDino \/ CC BY 4.0.<\/p>\n

Yantaloong lini roamed our planet during the Middle Jurassic epoch, between 174 and 161 million years ago.<\/p>\n

The ancient species likely belongs to Turiasauria<\/a>, a clade of large, long-necked sauropods that flourished from the Early Jurassic to the Early Cretaceous.<\/p>\n

The evolutionary relationships within the clade remain one of the more debated topics in sauropod paleontology.<\/p>\n

\u201cTuriasauria were originally defined in 2006 as all Eusauropoda closer to Turiasaurus riodevensis than to Saltasaurus loricatus and formed a monophyletic group outside the Neosauropoda<\/a>,\u201d said Dr. Ya-Ming Wang from the Geological Museum of China and colleagues.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough the monophyly of Turiasauria was questioned in 2009, later studies have reaffirmed Turiasauria as a valid clade.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNevertheless, the internal composition of this group remains uncertain and subject to ongoing revision.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil now, Turiasauria have been found from the Lower Jurassic to Lower Cretaceous of Europe, North America, Africa, and India.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers identified Yantaloong lini from six presacral vertebrae found in the Zhanghe Formation<\/a> in China\u2019s Yunnan province.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Middle Jurassic of China hosts a diverse dinosaur fauna dominated by mamenchisaurid sauropods<\/a>, along with some early diverging eusauropod and neosauropod members,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, no transitional species have been confirmed in East Asia along the evolutionary path from mamenchisaurids to neosauropods.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yantaloong lini, according to the scientists, may fill this gap.<\/p>\n

In most of the team\u2019s phylogenetic analyses, the species landed inside an unconventional version of Turiasauria, a clade that includes Lapparentosaurus, Jobaria, and Atlasaurus genera.<\/p>\n

A few alternative analyses placed it instead as a sauropod outside the traditional turiasaurian grouping, or even within Neosauropoda itself, though the authors consider those scenarios less likely.<\/p>\n

Anatomically, Yantaloong lini is something of a mosaic: its vertebrae combine advanced features more typical of dicraeosaurines and titanosaurs with older, more primitive traits characteristic of earliest eusauropods.<\/p>\n

\u201cYantaloong lini provides a better understanding of the vertebral morphological diversity in sauropods, such as the pneumatization and the hyposphene-hypantrum complex, which further supports its phylogenetic position as a form transitional towards Neosauropoda,\u201d the paleontologists concluded.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe new species probably represents the first discovery of a turiasaurian sauropod in China and even in East Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n

The discovery of Yantaloong lini is reported in a paper<\/a> in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

Xiao-Qin Zhang et al. 2026. The first turiasaurian sauropod (Dinosauria: Eusauropoda) from East Asia. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 206 (2): zlaf201; doi: 10.1093\/zoolinnean\/zlaf201<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paleontologists working in southern China have identified a new species of sauropod dinosaur that appears to belong to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559243,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[2300,607,22598,95133,107196,25078,39988,275095,264765,111,139,69,60883,60884,147,275096,95240,275097,275098,95241,275099],"class_list":["post-559242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-asia","tag-china","tag-dinosaur","tag-east-asia","tag-eusauropoda","tag-fossil","tag-jurassic","tag-mamenchisauridae","tag-neosauropoda","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sauropod","tag-sauropoda","tag-science","tag-turiasauria","tag-vertebra","tag-yantaloong","tag-yantaloong-lini","tag-yunnan","tag-zhanghe-formation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}