Hairy Museum of Natural History

• 
  The head and (long) neck of Miragaia longicollum
  Credit: Zachary Miller, When Pigs Fly Returns

• New Dinosaur: Miragaia longicollum
• Name Means: Long-neck from Miragaia (or, alternately, “long-necked wonderful goddess of the Earth”)
• Relations: Dacentrurine stegosaur
• Holotype: ML 433, partial skull and mostly complete skeleton from the arms forward
• Referred Material: ML 433-A, parts of the pelvis and dorsal vertebrae from a juvenile
• Location: Miragaia, Portugal
• Age: Late Jurassic (~150,000,000 years ago)
• Length: ~3.5 meters (about 11.5 feet)
• Info:
  Top: the fossils of Miragaia longicollum.
  Bottom: Skeletal reconstruction with human holding a 2m-tall scale bar
  Credit: Dr. Octavio Mateus, from Everything Dinosaur
• I’m very late in getting a post up about Miragaia, and there are several good posts out there already about this unexpected fossil and its unusual anatomy. So I’ll just say, “Lookit that long-necked critter!” and encourage interested readers to download the paper and check out the posts listed in the “Further Reading” list for analysis and commentary on this impressively cervical stegosaur.
• Reference: Mateus, O., Maidment, S. C. R., and Christiansen, N. A., 2009. A new long-necked ‘sauropod-mimic’ stegosaur and the evolution of the plated dinosaurs. Proceedings of the Royal Society B Published online. doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.1909.
• Further Reading:
  • Chinleana: New Long Necked Stegosaur Miragaia longicollum
  • Dinosaur Tracking: Miragaia, the Long-Necked Stegosaur
  • Discovery News: Long-Necked Stegosaur Defies Reputation
  • Dracovenator: Stegopod!
  • Everything Dinosaur: New Long-Necked Stegosaurs Discovered
  • Palaeoblog: Miragaia: The long necked stegosaur
  • SV-POW!: SV-POW! showdown: stegosaurs vs. sauropods
  • When Pigs Fly Returns: Another stegosauropod

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, Jurassic.