Meet Moabosaurus Utahensis: 125-Million-Year-Old Sauropod From Utah Finally Has A Name

A dinosaur whose remains were excavated over a period of three decades between 1975 and 2005 has finally been christened. As is evident from its name, Moabosaurus utahensis was found in the vicinity of Moah — Utah's "gold mine for dinosaur bones."

"We’re honoring the city of Moab and the State of Utah because they were so supportive of our excavation efforts over the decades it’s taken us to pull the animal out of the ground," Brooks Britt, a professor of geology at Utah's Brigham Young University and lead author of a paper describing the discovery, said in a statement.

The 32-foot-long herbivore belongs to a group of herbivorous dinosaurs known as sauropods — a group that includes giants like the Brontosaurus. What distinguishes it from its cousin is the age it existed in. The fossil remains show that Moabosaurus lived about 125 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period when the global diversity of sauropods had already dropped.

Analysis of the remains suggests Moabosaurus was closely related to sauropods like Euhelopus and Brachiosaurus.

"It is clear that Moabosaurus can be readily differentiated from other North American Early Cretaceous sauropods, as well as from the Late Jurassic Camarasaurus. We now compare Moabosaurus to two roughly contemporaneous taxa that share a number of similarities, Turiasaurus of Spain and Tendaguria of Tanzania," the researchers wrote in the study. "We suspect that Tendaguria is closely allied with Moabosaurus."

The remains were found scattered among over 5,500 fossils excavated from the Dalton Wells Quarry, which contains dinosaurs of all sizes and ages — something that paleontologists say is indicative of a massive die-off event.

"We’re lucky to get anything out of this site,” Britt said in the statement. "Most bones we find are fragmentary, so only a small percentage of them are usable. And that’s why it took so long to get this animal put together: we had to collect huge numbers of bones in order to get enough that were complete."