Dino card No. 1365 of 2,027

Panzhousaurus

Say it: pan-ZHOU-sore-us

Name means: “Panzhou lizard”1

Ate: FishSea reptilesMiddle TriassicNot technically a dinosaur

Panzhousaurus was a small, long-necked marine reptile that swam in the warm seas of China during the Middle Triassic, about 244 million years ago. It had a short, rounded snout and a body less than 50 centimetres long, making it one of the smaller sea reptiles of its time.1 2

Fun fact: this sea reptile swam while dinosaurs walked on land. Everyone calls them dinos, but they were a different branch of reptiles.

Lived

244 to 243 million years ago3

Middle Triassic

Fossils found in

Yangjuan Village, Xinmin Town, Panzhou City, Guizhou Province, China2

Food

Fish2

Length

0.36 to 0.5 m1

the preserved holotype is 36 cm long; total body length may have been less than 50 cm

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

as long as 3 bananas end to end

How big was Panzhousaurus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Panzhousaurus had a very long neck with 24 vertebrae, which helped it twist and turn to catch prey.1

Its snout was short and rounded, which is unusual for many marine reptiles and gave it a blunt-looking face.1

Scientists have found a juvenile Panzhousaurus that was only 17 centimetres long, showing that babies had bigger eyes compared to their body size.2

Panzhousaurus lived alongside other marine reptiles and fish in the Panxian Fauna, a rich fossil site in China.2

The name Panzhousaurus comes from Panzhou, the city in China where its fossils were first discovered.1

Its hands and feet had a special finger bone formula: 3 to 4-5 to 4-3 in the front and 2 to 3-4 to 5-3 in the back, which helped scientists identify it.2

AI-made picture of Panzhousaurus — An AI-made picture of how Panzhousaurus might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Panzhousaurus
Named by: Jiang et al. 20183
Group: Sea reptiles
Family / clade: Pachypleurosauridae3
Classification: Sauropterygia3
Age of the rocks: 244 to 243 million years ()3
Rock formations: Guanling3
Countries: China3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Panzhousaurus was first described in 2018 by a team of scientists led by D.-Y. Jiang, based on a nearly complete skeleton found in the Guanling Formation of Guizhou, China.3 1
Still debated: Scientists still debate whether Panzhousaurus is more closely related to keichousaurids or to other early eosauropterygians, and its exact place in the family tree is not yet settled.2

Where the facts come from

Panzhousaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
PeerJ Osteology and phylogeny of Panzhousaurus rotundirostris from the Middle Triassic (Anisian) of Guizhou Province, China, and implications for the origin of Keichousauridae (Pachypleurosauroidea, Eosauropterygia) (peerj.com)
Panzhousaurus in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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