Apatodon
Extinct genus of dinosaurs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Apatodon is a dubious genus of dinosaur that may have been a theropod.[1] The type, and only species, A. mirus, was named in 1877 by Othniel Charles Marsh.[2] It was found in the Late Jurassic-aged Morrison Formation of Colorado.[3]
| Apatodon Temporal range: Late Jurassic, | |
|---|---|
Scientific classification  | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Genus: | †Apatodon Marsh, 1877 |
| Species: | †A. mirus |
| Binomial name | |
| †Apatodon mirus Marsh, 1877 | |
History
When Marsh named Apatodon in 1877, he thought it was a jaw with a tooth from a Mesozoic pig, but it was soon shown that the specimen was an eroded vertebra, from a dinosaur possibly from the Morrison Formation of Garden Park, Colorado.[2] Baur (1890) correctly identified that Marsh (1877) had misidentified the neural spine as the tooth of a pig-like animal.[4]
Apatodon was assigned to Iguanodontoidea by Hay in 1902,[5] to Ornithischia by von Huene in 1909,[6] to Stegosauridae by von Zittel in 1911,[7] and to Titanosaurinae by Steel in 1970,[8] and also Casanovas et al. in 1987.[9] (Kuhn in 1939 also listed Apatodon as a sauropod).[10]
The only recovered specimen is not regarded as sufficient to identify a particular species of dinosaur. However, George Olshevsky considered Apatodon to be synonymous with the contemporaneous Allosaurus fragilis.[11] The issue is now beyond resolution; however, as the type bone fragment has been lost.[12]
