The Forest Sandstone is a geological formation in southern Africa , dating to roughly between 200 and 190 million years ago and covering the Hettangian to Sinemurian stages of the Jurassic Period in the Mesozoic Era . As its name suggests, it consists mainly of sandstone .
14-649: Fossils of the prosauropod dinosaur Massospondylus and the primitive sauropod Vulcanodon have been recovered from the Forest Sandstone. The formation is a sedimentary unit, consisting mainly of aeolian sands and silts with interbedded fluvial sediments, laid down during a period of increasing aridity. The Forest Sandstone is found in Botswana , Zambia and Zimbabwe , in the Mid-Zambezi, Mana Pools, Cabora Bassa and Limpopo Basins , with its greatest thickness in
28-481: A combination of characters. Some of these are shared with members of the Theropoda : the premaxilla is pointed downwards forming a subnarial gap with the maxilla and the anterior-most teeth are unserrated; in the location where with theropods the fenestra promaxillaris is positioned, a small depression is present. Basal traits consist of a large skull, a short thighbone, the possession of just two sacral vertebrae and
42-539: A mirco-computed tomography scan on the postcranial skeletons of some of the earliest saurischian dinosaurs that lived during the late Carnian including Gnathovorax with sauropodomorphs Pampadromaeus and Buriolestes , which showed that the invasive air sac system was absent and that their bones were not pneumatised. These results indicate that pneumatisation in archosaur groups ( pterosaurs , theropods and sauropodomorphs ) are not homologous, but are traits that independently evolved at least 3 times. Pampadromaeus
56-667: Is alternatively considered its own genus or a synonym of Plateosaurus . Plateosauridae, which was first named by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1895, is a stem-based taxon and it was defined by Sereno, 1998 as all animals more closely related to Plateosaurus engelhardti than to Massospondylus carinatus . Galton and Upchurch, 2004 proposed the following definition: all animals more closely related to Plateosaurus engelhardti than to Massospondylus carinatus and Yunnanosaurus huangi . Yates, 2007 defined it as all animals more closely related to Plateosaurus engelhardti than to Diplodocus longus . Recent cladistic analyses suggest that
70-562: Is an extinct genus of basal sauropodomorph dinosaurs known from the Late Triassic ( Carnian ) Santa Maria Formation of the Paraná Basin in Rio Grande do Sul , southern Brazil . Pampadromaeus is known only from the holotype specimen ULBRA -PVT016, a disarticulated , partial but well preserved skeleton from a single individual which includes most of the skull bones and
84-651: Is the major groundwater-bearing unit of the Upper Karoo Group. Prosauropod Plateosauridae is a family of plateosaurian sauropodomorphs from the Late Triassic of Europe , Greenland , Africa and Asia . Although several dinosaurs have been classified as plateosaurids over the years, the family Plateosauridae is now restricted to Plateosaurus , Yimenosaurus , Euskelosaurus , and Issi . In another study, Yates (2003) sunk Sellosaurus into Plateosaurus (as P. gracilis ). Gresslyosaurus
98-1048: The Cabora Bassa Basin . The formation is dated at 200 to 190 Ma . The Forest Sandstone is the penultimate formation in the Upper Karoo Group of the Karoo Supergroup , lying above the Pebbly Arkose Formation and below the Batoka Formation . In the Thuli Basin it is sometimes referred to as the Samkoto Formation. The Forest Sandstone has been correlated to the Clarens Formation of the Great Karoo Basin in South Africa. The Forest Sandstone
112-536: The cladogram below: Chromogisaurus Pampadromaeus Panphagia Saturnalia Guaibasaurus Pantydraco Thecodontosaurus Efraasia Plateosauravus Ruehleia Macrocollum Unaysaurus Issi Plateosaurus gracilis Plateosaurus trossingensis Riojasaurus Eucnemosaurus Massopoda [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Pampadromaeus Pampadromaeus
126-590: The lower jaws ; dorsal , sacral and caudal vertebrae ; elements of the shoulder girdle and the forelimbs , an ilium and elements of the hindlimbs . It was collected in the upper Hyperodapedon biozone from the Alemoa Member of the Santa Maria Formation ( Rosário do Sul Group ) in the "Janner" (also known as "Várzea do Agudo") locality, geopark of Paleorrota, dating to the Carnian faunal stage of
140-426: The clade Prosauropoda , which was named by Huene in 1920 and was defined by Sereno, 1998 as all animals more closely related to Plateosaurus engelhardti than to Saltasaurus loricatus , is a synonym of Plateosauridae as both contain the same taxa. Plateosauridae was recovered as a monophyletic group in the large phylogenetic analysis of early dinosaurs that was presented by Baron, Norman & Barrett (2017) in
154-597: The early Late Triassic , about 230–228 million years ago . A U-Pb ( uranium decay) dating found that the Santa Maria Formation dated around 233.23 million years ago, putting it 1.5 million years older than the Ischigualasto Formation , and making the two formations approximately equal as the earliest dinosaur localities. Pampadromaeus was a small bipedal animal. It shows a mosaic of basal and derived traits. It differs from other sauropodomorphs by
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#1732858625047168-461: The journal Nature . In this analysis, the group was found to be sister to Massopoda within the clade Plateosauria . The 2021 study by Beccari et al . describing Issi saaneq recovered it as the sister taxon of Plateosaurus . Their phylogenetic analyses also recovered Macrocollum and Unaysaurus within the Plateosauridae. The results of their phylogenetic analyses are shown in
182-410: The presence of fifteen teeth in the pterygoid . There were four teeth in the premaxilla and about twenty in both the maxilla and the lower jaw for a total of eighty-eight. The teeth were large, elongated, lanceolate, slightly recurved, sharply pointed and coarsely serrated. The lower leg was much longer than the thighbone, indicating a cursorial lifestyle. In 2022, Aureliano and colleagues performed
196-406: Was first named by Sergio F. Cabreira, Cesar L. Schultz, Jonathas S. Bittencourt, Marina B. Soares, Daniel C. Fortier, Lúcio R. Silva and Max C. Langer in 2011 and the type species is Pampadromaeus barberenai . The generic name is derived from Quechua pampa , "plain", in reference to the present landscape of the site, and Greek δρομεύς, dromeus , "runner", referring to the cursorial habits;
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