Tübingen (dpa / lsw) – Researchers have named a previously unknown dinosaur species after the city of Tübingen. The “Tuebingosaurus maierfritzorum” lived more than 200 million years ago in what is now the Swabian Jura, the University of Tübingen announced on Thursday. The species was discovered during a re-examination of already known bones and is similar to large long-necked dinosaurs. The scientists published the discovery in the journal “Vertebrate Zoology”.
The bones were found in 1922 in a quarry near Trossingen (Tuttlingen district) and had been stored at the University of Tübingen for a good 100 years. So far, researchers had assumed that they belonged to the already known species of plateosaurs. However, in a new study, scientists found that many of the skeletal bones did not match this species. The bones indicated that the dinosaur moved on four legs – not like plateosaurs on two legs.
The name of the new dinosaur is “a tribute to our beautiful university town and its residents,” said one of the two authors of the study, Ingmar Werneburg. The species name “maierfritzorum” is intended to honor the German zoologists Wolfgang Maier from Tübingen and Uwe Fritz from the Senckenberg Natural History Collections in Dresden.
