Pneumatoarthrus
Pneumatoarthrus is an extinct genus of sea turtle known from the Late Cretaceous (early Maastrichtian) Mount Laurel Formation of Monmouth County, New Jersey.
Pneumatoarthrus | |
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Scientific classification | |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Reptilia |
Order: | Testudines |
Suborder: | Cryptodira |
Family: | †Protostegidae |
Genus: | †Pneumatoarthrus Cope, 1870 |
Species: | †P. peloreus |
Binomial name | |
†Pneumatoarthrus peloreus Cope, 1870 | |
Taxonomy
The holotype of Pneumatoarthrus, ANSP 9225, was originally identified as a sacrum belonging to Hadrosaurus by Joseph Leidy in an 1865 monograph on Cretaceous reptiles from the US.[1] Edward Drinker Cope later identified it belonging to a dinosaur more closely related to Anchisaurus, Efraasia, and Clepsysaurus than to Dryptosaurus and Ornithopsis,[2] and in his 1872 description of the sea turtle Protostega he decided that Pneumatoarthrus was likely a sea turtle as well, which he reiterated in his 1875 monograph on Cretaceous vertebrate fossils from the Western Interior.[3][4] Later authors overlooked Cope's 1875 monograph and considered it either a theropod or a hadrosaur (Huene 1932 considered Pneumatoarthrus the sacral vertebrae of Dryptosaurus).[5] Baird (1979) confirmed the protostegid identification of Pneumatoarthrus by Cope (1872, 1875) based on examination of ANSP 9225.[6]
References
- Leidy, 1865. Memoir on the extinct reptiles of the Cretaceous formations of the United States. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. 14(6), 135 pp.
- Cope, 1870. Observations on the Reptilia of the Triassic formations of the Atlantic region of the United States. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 11, 444-446.
- Cope, 1872. A description of the genus Protostega, a form of extinct Testudinata. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 12, 422-433.
- Cope, 1875. The Vertebrata of the Cretaceous formations of the West. Report of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories. 2, 303 pp.
- http://theropoddatabase.com/Non-theropods.htm
- Baird, D., 1979. Pneumatoarthrus Cope, 1870, not a dinosaur but a sea-turtle. Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, 129(4):71-81.