Soumyasaurus

Name means: “Soumya's lizard”1

Ate: PlantsBeaked plant-eatersLate Triassic

Soumyasaurus was a tiny, plant-eating dinosaur relative that lived in what is now Texas. It was smaller than a cat and had a beak for snipping plants. Scientists only found a piece of its jaw, so it is still a bit of a mystery.1 3

Lived

227 to 206 million years ago3

Late Triassic

Fossils found in

Miller's Ranch Quarry, Cooper Canyon Formation, Texas, USA3 1

Food

Plants3 1

Length

up to 0.85 m2

estimate

Weight

up to 1.9 kg2

estimate

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

How heavy was it?

as heavy as 16 bananas

as long as 1.5 house cats nose to tailas long as 5 bananas end to endlighter than a house catas heavy as 16 bananas

How big was Soumyasaurus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Soumyasaurus is known from only one small, poorly preserved left jawbone that is less than 3 cm long.1

Its name honors Soumya, the son of paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee, who also named Shuvosaurus after his other son.1

The species name 'aenigmaticus' means 'enigma' or 'riddle' in Latin, because the fossil is so hard to study.1

Soumyasaurus had teeth that were fused to its jaw bone by a rim of fibrous bone, a trait shared with other silesaurids.1

Unlike many other silesaurids, Soumyasaurus had smooth, conical teeth instead of leaf-shaped ones.1

The tip of its jaw is missing, so scientists do not know if it had a beak like other silesaurids.1

Soumyasaurus lived about 220 million years ago during the Late Triassic period.1

AI-made picture of Soumyasaurus — An AI-made picture of how Soumyasaurus 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: Soumyasaurus
Named by: Sarigul et al. 20183
Group: Beaked plant-eaters
Family / clade: Silesauridae3
Classification: Ornithischia3
Age of the rocks: 227 to 206 million years (Norian)3
Rock formations: Cooper Canyon3
Countries: USA3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Soumyasaurus was named in 2018 by paleontologists Volkan Sarıgül, Federico Agnolín, and Sankar Chatterjee based on a jawbone found in the Post Quarry of Texas.1 3
Still debated: Scientists are not sure whether Soumyasaurus was a true dinosaur or a close dinosaur relative, because its fossils are so incomplete.1

Where the facts come from

Soumyasaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
Soumyasaurus aenigmaticus | Dinosaur Database by DinoAnimals.com (dinoanimals.com)
Soumyasaurus in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

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