Well, who knew? There I was posting images of “Pelorosaurus” becklesi‘s humerus, radius and ulna, and skin impression. There I was saying that this beast is due a proper description, and warrants its own generic name. And what should come out today but a new paper by Paul Upchurch, Phil Mannion and, oh yes, me, which does exactly that.

The headline news is the long-overdue establishment of a new genus name for this species — something that we’ve known was needed at least since Upchurch’s (1993) dissertation. Paul and Phil came up with the name Haestasaurus, from “Haesta”, the name of the putative pre-Roman chieftain whose people apparently settled the area of Hastings and gave the town its name. It’s nice that I can finally stop typing the scare-quotes around the no-longer-relevant old genus name “Pelorosaurus“!

(As you can see, the photography is rather better than in my own illustrations, which I made independently some years ago.)

Of course Paul has had an eye on this work, on and off, since the early 1990s. Then in the late 2000s, when I was working on Xenoposeidon and other Wealden sauropods, I started work independently on a redescription — which of course is why I prepared the figures that have appeared in the last few posts. But that work petered out as I started working more on other specimens and on the problems of the sauropod neck. More recently, Paul and Phil hunkered down and got the nitty-gritty descriptive work done.

Once they had a complete draft manuscript, they very graciously invited me onto the authorship — not something they had to do, but they chose to based on my previous interest in the specimen. My contribution was minor: I provided two of the illustrations, tidied up the early versions of several others, and did an editing pass on the text.

(This map is one of the two illustrations that I provided; the other is the multi-view photograph of the Pelorosaurus conbeari humerus.)

I’m grateful to Paul and Phil, both for inviting me onto this project, and for taking into account my strong preference for an open-access venue. It’s largely because of the latter that the paper now appears in PLOS ONE, where the glorious colour illustrations appear at full resolution and may be re-used for any purpose subject to attribution.

So: what actually is Haestasaurus? Is it the early titanosaur that we’ve all been assuming? The unexciting answer is: we don’t really know. Our paper contains three phylogenetic hypotheses (all of them Paul and Phil’s work, I can’t take any credit). These results are from adding Haestasaurus to the Carballido and Sander (2014) matrix, to the Mannion et al. (2013) standard discrete matrix and to the Mannion et al. (2013) continuous-and-discrete matrix. Only the last of these recovers Haestasaurus as a titanosaur — as sister to Diamantinasaurus and then Malawisaurus, making it a lithostrotian well down inside Titanosauria.

Both both of the other analyses find Haestasaurus as a very basal macronarian — outside of Titanosauriformes. Here is the result of the analysis based on Carballido and Sander’s Europasaurus matrix:

As you can see, Haestasaurus is here a camarasaurid, making it (along with Camarasaurus itself) the most basal of all macronarians. In the second analysis — the one using discrete characters only from Mannion et al.’s Lusotitan paper — Haestasaurus is again in the most basal macronarian clade, but this time as sister to Janenschia and then Tehuelchesaurus. (In this topology, Camarasaurus is the next most basal macronarian after that three-taxon clade.)

So it looks like Haestasaurus is either a very basal macronarian or a pretty derived titanosaur. We don’t know which.

But, hey, at least it has a proper name now!

Acknowledgements

It’s Matt’s birthday today. I’d like to dedicate a sauropod to him, but I don’t have the authority to do that. So instead, I dedicate this blog-post to him, and declare it the Mathew J. Wedel Memorial Blog Post.

References

• Carballido, Jose L., and P. Martin Sander. 2013. Postcranial axial skeleton of Europasaurus holgeri (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from the Upper Jurassic of Germany: implications for sauropod ontogeny and phylogenetic relationships of basal Macronaria. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 12(3):335-387. doi:10.1080/14772019.2013.764935
• Mannion, Philip D., Paul Upchurch, Rosie N. Barnes and Octávio Mateus. 2013. Osteology of the Late Jurassic Portuguese sauropod dinosaur Lusotitan atalaiensis (Macronaria) and the evolutionary history of basal titanosauriforms. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 168(1):98–206. doi:10.1111/zoj.12029
• Upchurch, Paul, Philip D. Mannion and Micahel P Taylor. 2015. The Anatomy and Phylogenetic Relationships of “Pelorosaurus” becklesii (Neosauropoda, Macronaria) from the Early Cretaceous of England. PLoS ONE 10(6):e0125819. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0125819