Lapparentosaurus

Lapparentosaurus is a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic. Its fossils were found in Madagascar (Isalo III Formation). It contains one species, Lapparentosaurus madagascariensis. The genus and species were named by José Bonaparte in 1986. The classification of Lapparentosaurus is controversial, as it exhibits a combination of characteristics of basal sauropods and titanosauriforms.

== Discovery and naming == In 1895 Richard Lydekker named a new species of Bothriospondylus, B. madagascariensis based on fossils found before 1894 by Joseph Thomas Last in the Majunga Basin in layers of the Bathonian, the Isalo III Formation. In a 1975 unpublished thesis, A. Ogier described a large amount of juvenile sauropod material, also from the Isalo III Formation, that he identified as more specimens of Bothriospondylus. In 1986, José Fernando Bonaparte considered the referral of all the Malagasy sauropod material to Bothriospondylus to be unjustified, and due to the distinctiveness of the material described by Ogier, Bonaparte proposed the new genus and species Lapparentosaurus madagascariensis for it. He designated two neural arches of dorsal vertebrae, MAA 91-92, as the holotype of his new species. The generic name honours Albert-Félix de Lapparent.