Paleontologists have recognized a brand new species of sauropod dinosaur, Mamenchisaurus sanjiangensis, from a partial skeleton found close to Chongqing in southwest China, a discover that sheds recent gentle on sauropod evolution in East Asia.
The dinosaur lived in the course of the Early Oxfordian age of the Jurassic, round 160 million years in the past. The bones have been recovered from purplish‑purple silty mudstones within the center portion of the Higher Shaximiao Formation, a widely known fossil‑bearing stratum of that area.
Regardless of being identified solely from a single partial skeleton, the researchers classify M. sanjiangensis as a “diverged mamenchisaurid,” carefully associated to different species inside the Mamenchisaurus genus. In keeping with the research’s lead writer Hui Dai and colleagues on the Chongqing Institute of Paleontology, this discovery underscores a peak in sauropod range in the course of the Late Jurassic, when many non‑neosauropodan eusauropod lineages, just like the mamenchisaurids, thrived globally alongside rising neosauropods.
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The dominance of mamenchisaurids in Late Jurassic Asian fossil information seems markedly completely different from the sauropod faunas of contemporaneous European, North- and South-American formations. This means that Asia, significantly what’s now southwestern China, was a hotspot for sauropod range, particularly close to the middle-late Jurassic transition.
Past enriching the taxonomy of early-diverging sauropods, M. sanjiangensis offers crucial information for reconstructing the evolutionary historical past and paleobiogeography of Jurassic‑period eusauropods in East Asia. The authors notice, nevertheless, that many gaps stay within the fossil report, and additional reexamination of present specimens is required to higher perceive the early branching occasions that formed sauropod evolution throughout historical continents.
The findings have been printed on November 25, 2025 within the journal Scientific Reviews
