Dated back in 1934 on Southern Sakhalin Island, a Japanese team has found fossils which were then named Nipponosaurus sachalinensis.
Nipponosaurus got its name from the word ‘Nippon’ which means Japan in the Japanese word and it was named by Professor Takumi Nagao of Hokkaido Imperial University.
[ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”show” ihc_mb_who=”2,3,5″ ihc_mb_template=”1″ ]Sakhalin Island is now considered part of Russia but back then in the 1934, before World War II breaks out, Southern Sakhalin Island was part of the Japan territory from 1905 to 1945.
Thus, it was quickly named as such and had been declared as a separate species from closely related dinosaurs found around North America and Europe.
However, the claim became debatable since the fossils were from an immature dinosaur that may have undergone changing bones as it grew into an adult.
Asides from that, its appearance was highly similar to other fossils that were already named.
A team of researchers from Japan and also their collaborators from Canada and the US started to dissect and investigate on the fossilised bones of Nipponosaurus.
The results of their findings published in the journal Historical Biologysuggests that Nipponosaurus is indeed a valid taxon as it showed enough differences to be a completely separate species.
The special traits include that of the shelf-like structure on the lower jaw, and extremely short front legs.
It is closely related to Europe’s hadrosaurid (duck-billed dinosaurs) Blasisaurus and Arenysaurus but it is more primitive than what was originally thought.
This indicates that Nipponosaurus is one of the dinosaur species that migrated from Europe to East Asia.
From the Hokkaido University website, Ryuji Takasaki, a graduate student of Hokkaido University and lead author said that ‘Our study clarified the phylogenetic status of Nipponosaurus, and we are now interested in the relationship between Nipponosaurus and other Japanese dinosaurs, whose fossils have been unearthed one after another in recent years.
“We aim to discover how diverse dinosaurs inhabited East Asian coastal areas.”
[/ihc-hide-content]
