Summary
Pradhania (named after Dhuiya Pradhan, a fossil collector at the Indian Statistical Institute) is a genus of massospondylid sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Sinemurian-age (Early Jurassic) Upper Dharmaram Formation of India. It was first named by T. S. Kutty, Sankar Chatterjee, Peter M. Galton and Paul Upchurch in 2007 and the type species is Pradhania gracilis. It was a sauropodomorph of modest size, only about four meters (13 ft) long, and is known from fragmentary remains.[1] It was originally regarded as a basal sauropodomorph[1] but new cladistic analysis performed by Novas et al., 2011 suggests that Pradhania is a massospondylid.[2] Pradhania presents two synapomorphies of Massospondylidae recovered in their phylogenetic analysis.[2]
| Pradhania Temporal range: Early Jurassic,
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Scientific classification 
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| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Clade: | Saurischia |
| Clade: | †Sauropodomorpha |
| Family: | †Massospondylidae |
| Genus: | †Pradhania Kutty et al. 2007 |
| Species | |
References edit
- ^ a b Kutty, T.S.; Sankar Chatterjee; Peter M. Galton; Paul Upchurch (2007). "Basal sauropodomorphs (Dinosauria: Saurischia) from the Lower Jurassic of India: their anatomy and relationships". Journal of Paleontology. 81 (6): 1552–1574. doi:10.1666/04-074.1.
- ^ a b Fernando E. Novas; Martin D. Ezcurra; Sankar Chatterjee; T. S. Kutty (2011). "New dinosaur species from the Upper Triassic Upper Maleri and Lower Dharmaram formations of central India". Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 101 (3–4): 333–349. doi:10.1017/S1755691011020093.