Venenosaurus

Venenosaurus ( ) is a genus of sauropod dinosaur that lived in what is now Utah during the Early Cretaceous. Its type and only species is Venenosaurus dicrocei. Fossils of Venenosaurus were first discovered in 1998, by Denver Museum of Natural History volunteer Anthony DiCroce, and described as a new genus and species in 2001 by Virginia Tidwell and colleagues, who named the species for DiCroce. Venenosaurus was a relatively small sauropod, and was similar to Cedarosaurus, another sauropod from the Early Cretaceous of Utah.

==Discovery and naming== In the spring of 1998, a team of volunteers for the Denver Museum of Natural History, including Anthony "Tony" DiCroce, found a fossil site in Grand County, Utah, which they named Tony's Bone Bed. The bone bed was in the Poison Strip Member of the Cedar Mountain Formation, and contained the remains of the iguanodont Planicoxa, a theropod, and an adult and juvenile of a sauropod. In 2001, Virginia Tidwell, Kenneth Carpenter, and Susanne Meyer described the sauropod remains as a new genus and species, Venenosaurus dicrocei. The genus name comes from the Latin veneno, "poison", in reference to the Poison Strip Member, and the species name honors DiCroce for his discovery of the fossils.