Caseosaurus
Caseosaurus is a genus of saurischian dinosaur that lived approximately 221.5 to 212 million years ago during the latter part of the Triassic Period in what is now Texas, North America. It was a small, lightly-built, bipedal, ground-dwelling carnivore, and could grow up to long.
Description
The genus Caseosaurus, is known from specimen UMMP 8870, an isolated hip bone measuring nearly 141 mm. A 3D model of this specimen is available on the . Size estimates suggest that Caseosaurus was up to long and weighed up to at most.Discovery
The genus name Caseosaurus means "Case's lizard", and was named in honor of the scientist who discovered it, Ermine Cowles Case. The suffix "-saurus" Greek means "lizard". The specific name crosbyensis, is a Latinized rendering of Crosby County in Texas, the site of its discovery. Caseosaurus was described, and named by A. P. Hunt, Spencer G. Lucas, Andrew B. Heckert, Robert M. Sullivan, and Martin Lockley in 1998, with the type species being Caseosaurus crosbyensis.Classification
In 1998, Hunt et al., examined UMMP 8870, a partial hip bone originally assigned as a paratype of the dinosaur Chindesaurus, and designated it as the holotype of a new dinosaur, Caseosaurus crosbyensis. Irmis et al. concluded that an ilium, NMMNH P-35995 originally assigned by Heckert et al. in 2000 to the silesaurid Eucoelophysis, strongly resembles the Caseosaurus holotype. Langer examined the ilium and reassigned it back to the genus Chindesaurus.However, in 2018, Caseosaurus was considered a valid species, and was identified as a relative of Herrerasaurus, outside of the Dinosauria.