Dino card No. 1515 of 2,027

Qianxisaurus

Say it: chee-AN-shee-SORE-us

Name means: “lizard from western Guizhou”1

Ate: MeatSea reptilesMiddle TriassicNot technically a dinosaur

Qianxisaurus was a marine reptile that swam in the warm seas of China about 238 million years ago. It had a long body, a long tail, and a snout longer than the rest of its skull. This creature was not a dinosaur, but a type of eosauropterygian, a group of ancient sea reptiles.1

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

Lived

241 to 237 million years ago2

Middle Triassic

Fossils found in

Guizhou Province, southwestern China1

Food

Meat1

Length

up to 0.8 m1

estimated total body length, based on a nearly complete skeleton missing the tail tip

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

as long as 1.5 house cats nose to tailas long as 4 bananas end to end

How big was Qianxisaurus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Qianxisaurus had 28 back vertebrae and four sacral vertebrae, which is unusual for early sauropterygians.1

Its skull was only 7.6 cm (3 inches) long, but the whole animal was over 80 cm (2 feet 7 inches) in length.1

The name Qianxisaurus comes from 'Qianxi', meaning western Guizhou in Chinese, and 'saurus' meaning lizard.1

Qianxisaurus had a very small supratemporal fenestra, a hole in the skull roof, which was only slightly larger than a foramen in the parietal bone.1

Its dorsal ribs had a longitudinal groove on the upper-back surface, a feature shared with some other early marine reptiles like Corosaurus and Sanchiaosaurus.1

The only known fossil of Qianxisaurus was discovered in 2006 near the Huangnihe River in Xingyi, Guizhou, and is now kept at the National Museum of Natural Science in Taiwan.1

AI-made picture of Qianxisaurus — An AI-made picture of how Qianxisaurus 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: Qianxisaurus
Named by: Cheng et al. 20122
Group: Sea reptiles
Family / clade: Eosauropterygia2
Classification: Sauropterygia2
Age of the rocks: 241 to 237 million years (Ladinian)2
Rock formations: Falang2
Countries: China2
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: Qianxisaurus was named by Yen-Nien Cheng, Xiao-Chun Wu, Tamaki Sato and Hsi-Yin Shan in 2012 based on a nearly complete skeleton found in the Zhuganpo Member of the Falang Formation in Guizhou, China.1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure whether Qianxisaurus was a pachypleurosaur or a more basal eosauropterygian, and its exact relationships within the group are still debated.1

Where the facts come from

Qianxisaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
Qianxisaurus 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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