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Puertasaurus
''Puertasaurus'' is a genus of titanosaurid sauropod that appeared during the Late Cretaceous. Its bones were recovered from the Pari Aike Formation, which is dated to be middle Cenomanian in age. It lived in what is now Patagonia. The type species, ''Puertasaurus reuili'', is named in honor of Pablo Puerta and Santiago Reuil, who discovered the specimen in January 2001. ''Puertasaurus'' is based on a partial spinal column: a neck vertebra, a dorsal (back) vertebra, and two tail vertebrae.
==Anatomy==
Of the four neck, back and tail vertebrae discovered, together forming the holotype MPM 10002, the largest is the back vertebra, measuring 1.06 meters (3.48 ft) tall and 1.68 meters (5.51 ft) wide. This is the broadest sauropod vertebra known, and two-thirds of its width is made up of the huge wing-like diapophyses (side processes which supported the ribs), which are heavily buttresed and merge with both the centrum and the neural spine, forming a wide spade-like shape. In most sauropods, like ''Argentinosaurus'', they are far less large, lack buttresses, and form a simple cross-bar shape. The huge size of the diapophyses indicated a very wide rib cage, which would have been anywhere from (5 to 8 meters wide ), which would make ''Puertasaurus'' not just one of the largest dinosaurs, but also possibly the widest and heaviest. The neck was also unusual; based on the single known neck vertebra, ''Puertasaurus'' had a very long, squat neck with wide cervical ribs and thick but short neural spines (unlike its relative ''Futalognkosaurus'', whose neck was also very long, but was much deeper, with tall "shark fin" neural spines). This gave the neck a huge vertical range of motion and flexibility, and it may have been able to "bend over backwards" so that ''Puertasaurus'' could reach higher branches behind its head, without having to move its whole body - as a trade-off, the neck's sideways flexibility was more limited, though the extreme width of the neck may indicate a wide head as well, the jaws of which could take in more food per bite to make up for the lack of lateral flexibility. This strange, highly specialized squat-neck design〔http://paleoking.blogspot.com/2010/03/forgotten-giants-1-puertasaurus.html〕 is seen nowhere else in the Dinosauria.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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