A French paleontologist by the name of Philippe Taquet named this approximately 110-115 million-year-old dinosaur genus in 1976. The bones were discovered in the Gadoufaoua beds of northeast Niger, Africa just ten years earlier. There are currently two nearly complete skeletal structures associated with this dinosaur; both found in the southern Sahara Desert, and one of them Taquet researched. This paper will continue to discuss the Ouranosaurus in its entirety. It will start with background information, including how to pronounce its name, what it looked like, how it was classified, and which dinosaurs it was similar to. The paper will end with more descriptive aspects, such as when and where the dinosaur lived, what and how it ate, who its …show more content…
It would be safe to say that although Ouranosaurus has similarities to Iguanodon and the duckbilled hadrosaurs, it still is its own genus. To conclude whether Ouranosaurus is more of an iguanodontid or hadrosaur, one must look to Taquet’s colleagues’ findings. They created a cladogram that “concluded to the contrary that Iguanodon and Ouranosaurus were separate from the lineage that led through the Cretaceous to the duckbilled hadrosaurs” (Taquet). This meant that any similarities between Ouranosaurus and the hadrosaurs were merely coincidental. So it is final, the genus Ouranosaurus is a phylum chordata, classified as an Archosauria, ordered as an Ornithischian, subordered as an ornithopod in the iguanodontidae family, with its cousin being the famous Iguanodon. Other members of the iguanodontidae family that were similar included Camptosaurus, Muttaburrasaurus, and