page_title: Camarasaurus
section_title: History of discovery
hierarchical_section_title: Camarasaurus / History of discovery
caption_attribution_description: The earliest known skeletal reconstruction of a sauropod dinosaur: Camarasaurus supremus by John A. Ryder, 1877. First displayed at the December 21, 1877 meeting of The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. First published in Mook (1914) as a reduced figure. Later reproduced as a larger figure in Osborn and Mook (1921: plate LXXXII) (the later version is reproduced here).
context_page_description: Camarasaurus was a genus of quadrupedal, herbivorous dinosaurs. It was the most common of the giant sauropods to be found in North America. Its fossil remains have been found in the Morrison Formation of Colorado and Utah, dating to the Late Jurassic epoch, between 155 and 145 million years ago.
  Camarasaurus presented a distinctive cranial profile of a blunt snout and an arched skull that was remarkably square. It likely travelled in herds, or at least in family groups.
  The name means "chambered lizard", referring to the hollow chambers in its vertebrae.
context_section_description: The first record of Camarasaurus comes from 1877, when a few scattered vertebrae were located in Colorado, by Oramel W. Lucas. Pursuing his long-running and acrimonious competition (known as the Bone Wars) with Othniel Charles Marsh, the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope paid for the bones, and moving quickly, named them in the same year. For his part, Marsh later named some of his sauropod findings Morosaurus grandis, but most paleontologists today consider them to be a species of Camarasaurus Re: "Morosaurus" agilis. Such naming conflicts were common between the two rival dinosaur hunters.
  A complete skeleton of Camarasaurus was not described, by Charles W. Gilmore, until 1925. Because it was the skeleton from a young Camarasaurus, though, many illustrations  from the time show the dinosaur to be much smaller than it is now known to be.
caption: The earliest known skeletal reconstruction of a sauropod dinosaur: C. supremus by John A. Ryder, 1877
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