STL Science Center

STL Science Center

02 July 2013

The Mangrove Swamp

Stromer collected a lot of vertebrates in the early part of the 20th century in North Africa's Bahariya Formation. Included in these totals were fish and turtles, plesiosaurs, Spinosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, Bahariyasaurus, Aegyptosaurus, and a number of crocodiles. Sadly, it is popularly known that Stromer's collections were mostly destroyed in Munich during World War II. That probably made comparison between Aegyptosaurus and the newly discovered Paralititan difficult if not impossible; the extent of the casts and any other remains of Aegyptosaurus are unknown to myself and the description of Paralititan does not expressly describe Aegyptosaurus in comparison. That said, the describing article (hosted at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History website) announcing Paralititan is rather short at 3 total pages including references and images (one page of text without images approximately), and does not include the character states coded for on the first page. Paralititan, regardless, is missing a large number of characters, but the remains also contain a respectable amount of characters as well; enough to assuredly assign Paralititan to the titanosaurids. National Geographic, which has written many stories pertaining to African dinosaurs within the last 15 years or so, mentioned Paralititan briefly in a 2007 article as well. The neatest part of that issue is the poster I got from it that is now hanging in my school office. The image of Paralititan from that poster is pictured here.

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