Agathaumas

Sacrum and the vertebrae of Agathaumas sylvestris

• United States (Wyoming)

Agathaumas is a little-known genus of bird Beck dinosaurs ( ornithopods ) from the group of Ceratopsidae.

Features

From Agathaumas date only fossil remains of the sacrum and pelvis were found. From these findings, a membership to the Ceratopsidae suggests, but a more precise classification is not possible, which is why the Fund is listed as a nomen dubium.

Discovery and designation

The finding is noteworthy because it was the first discovery of a dinosaur from the group of ceratopsians. The fossils were discovered in the Lance Formation in Sweetwater County in the U.S. state of Wyoming and first described in 1872 by Edward Drinker Cope. The genus name is derived from the Greek words agan ( = "a lot" ) and thauma ( = " miracles "). Type species is A. sylvestris. The few findings enabled then no more accurate conclusions about the appearance of the animals, only some 15 years later settled with the findings of Triceratops imagine the look of Ceratopsidae. Triceratops is likely to be closely related to Agathaumas, according to Cope these genera are even synonymous, but this can not be evidence.

The finds are dated to the late Cretaceous ( Maastrichtian ) in age 72-66 million years ago.

Agathaumas in the culture

The painter Charles R. Knight created in 1897 a picture of Agathaumas in which, however, crept into the hull of Triceratops, the nasal horn of a Centrosaurinae and the rear armor of a Ankylosauriers. In a similar shape Agathaumas appears in the 1925 released movie The Lost World ( The Lost World).