Asia’s Oldest Stegosaurus Discovered in Chongqing

Stegosaurus is very peculiar in the dinosaur world. It has two rows of upright bone plates along the back from the neck to the tail and uses 2~4 pairs of large bone spurs at the end of the tail as weapons. with a body length of about 7-9 meters, but ahead only as big as a watermelon, has become a well-known star dinosaur.

Dinosaur fossils are an important channel for people to understand how dinosaurs lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago. However, there are not many Stegosaurus fossils found worldwide, and most of the skeletons have poor integrity. Therefore, the relationship between Stegosaurus and its early evolution still needs to be further studied.
Recently, researchers discovered the oldest stegosaurus fossil in Asia in Chongqing and named this stegosaurus Bashanosaurus primitives.

The oldest stegosaurus fossil ever discovered was located in Morocco, Africa, so some scholars believe that it originated in Africa. However, Huayangosaurus from Zigong, Sichuan is also a very primitive type of Stegosaurus. Therefore, some scholars also believe that Stegosaurus stemmed from China. The discovery of Bashanosaurus primitives provides new evidence for the origin of Stegosaurus in China, both in terms of its number and ancient degree.

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The results of stratigraphic dating show that Bashanosaurus primitives lived 169 million years ago, earlier than Huayangsaurus, which is comparable to the age of the oldest stegosaurus fossils found in Morocco, and the fossil is more complete. Therefore, Bashanosaurus primitives are considered to be the oldest stegosaurus in Asia and one of the oldest stegosaurs in the world.
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