CHUNGKINGOSAURUS (CHUNG-king-oh-SORE-us)
Period: Late Jurassic
Order, Suborder, Family: Ornithischia, Thyreophora, Stegosauridae
Location: Asia (People's Republic of China)
Length: 12 feet (4 meters)
At least five types of stegosaurs have been discovered in the Late Jurassic of China. More Late Jurassic stegosaurs have been found in China than anywhere else in the world. Chungkingosaurus jiangbeiensis was the smallest of these.
It was a spiky plant-eater with small, narrow, thickened plates arranged in two parallel rows along its back. The exact plate count is not known, but a specimen mounted at the Chongqing Municipal Museum has 14 pairs. That skeleton also has two pairs of tail spikes. Another Chungkingosaurus, perhaps a different species, has three pairs.
Workers unearthed Chungkingosaurus in 1977. Chinese paleontologists Dong Zhiming, Zhou Shiwu, and Chang Yihong described it in 1983. Other dinosaurs that were from the same age and found in the same place were the stegosaurs Chialingosaurus and Tuojiangosaurus, and the huge sauropods Mamenchisaurus and Omeisaurus. Other dinosaurs found from the same time were the giant meat-eaters Yangchuanosaurus and Szechuanosaurus, the small theropod Sinocoelurus, and the swift, small ornithopods Gongbusaurus and Yandusaurus.
Although these dinosaurs are different from those discovered by Marsh and Cope in the western United States, they do belong to the same families. The animals in the Late Jurassic in China were very similar to those found in North America.
