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[4] Astrodon – Maryland (1998)
Named after its star-shaped teeth, you probably wouldn’t even see those chompers when you came across an astrodon because they’d be 9 metres up in the frickin’ air! This behemoth brachiosaurid is presumed to have rocked upwards of 20 tons, though considered medium-sized in terms of sauropods.
The specimens were discovered in the Arundel Formation in Maryland back in the 1859 making it one of the earliest discovered dinosaurs in North America ever and the first discovered in Maryland.
That’s pretty cool – plus, Maryland sort of “snagged” the state fossil away from Texas, in a round-about unintentionally sort of way.
References:
http://cooldinofacts.wikia.com/wiki/Astrodon
[5]Pleurocoelus – Texas (1997)/maybe Paluxysaurus?
So … this is an awkward situation. It sounds like Texas adopted the Pleurocoelus (a brachiosaurid) back in ’97, but paleontologists “screwed up Texas’s plans” by suggesting that Pleurocoelus is actually an already identified species called Astrodon, which Maryland adopted as their own state fossil in ’98.
This means, for a few years, Texans were happy to have the 15-ton obscurity representing their state, until they learned that they’d adopted a species that might actually be a different species that someone else had already staked a claim to.
“Well, shit,” thought Texas. *
*I’m speculating and paraphrasing
So since 2009 Texas has been mulling over the idea of replacing Pleurocoelus/Astrodon with Paluxysaurus, which is kind of neat, in terms of its placement in sauropod evolution (if Texans believe in that sort of thing).
Paluxysaurus is believed to represent the evolutionary turning point between brachiosaurids and titanosaurs, which were the lineage of sauropods that would survive until the extinction event that ceased the existence of all dinosaurs shortly thereafter.
References:
http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/herbivorousdinosaurs/p/Paluxysaurus.htm
http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/herbivorousdinosaurs/p/pleurocoelus.htm
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