Lusovenator (meaning "Portuguese hunter") is a genus of carcharodontosaurian theropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic (Kimmeridgian) Praia de Amoreira Porto-Novo Member and the Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous (Tithonian-Berriasian) Assenta Member of the Lourinhã Formation in present-day Portugal. It includes one species, Lusovenator santosi.
Discovery and naming
The
holotype was discovered during the 1980s by José Joaquim dos Santos, and he donated his fossil collection to the Sociedade de História Natural around thirty years later. The unnamed holotype was described and placed in the
Allosauroidea in 2017.
[Malafaia, E., P. Mocho, F. Escaso, and F. Ortega. 2016. "A juvenile allosauroid theropod (Dinosauria, Saurischia) from the Upper Jurassic of Portugal". Historical Biology 29 : 654–676] The neotype, was described in 2019 and both specimens were placed within Carcharodontosauria.
[Malafaia, E., P. Mocho, F. Escaso, P. Dantas, and F. Ortega. 2019. "Carcharodontosaurian remains (Dinosauria, Theropoda) from the Upper Jurassic of Portugal". Journal of Paleontology 93 : 157–172] The species
Lusovenator santosi was named and described in 2020.
The known remains consist of the holotype SHN.036 - "a partial postcranial skeleton preserving
the odontoid, the atlantal intercentrum, a cervical vertebra, isolated cervical neural spines, dorsal vertebrae, fragments of sacral vertebrae, caudal vertebrae, chevrons, fragments of cervical and dorsal ribs, the right ilium, both pubes, and ischia", thought to represent a juvenile individual - and the neotype SHN.019, "a partial skeleton represented by a
series of articulated caudal vertebrae and an almost complete right pes".
Etymology
The generic name
Lusovenator is derived from
Lusitania, the province of the
Roman Empire that roughly matches present-day Portugal, affixed with the Latin
venator, meaning "hunter". The specific epithet,
santosi, refers to José Joaquim dos Santos, who discovered the remains.
Classification
The describers ran a phylogenetic analysis and recovered
Lusovenator within the clade Carcharodontosauria, outside Carcharodontosauridae and
Neovenatoridae. Their
cladogram is shown below:
[
]
Andrea Cau (2024) found Lusovenator to be in the family Carcharodontosauridae, forming a clade with Sauroniops, Veterupristisaurus, Eocarcharia, and Concavenator.
