Neosodon

History and taxonomy

Moussaye named this genus for a large, broken, worn tooth found in Wilmille, near Boulogne-sur-Mer, and neglected to give it a species name. He thought that it belonged to a theropod like Megalosaurus.

Sauvage synonymized it with his tooth species Iguanodon praecursor, which by this time had become mixed up with Edward Drinker Cope's roughly contemporaneous American Morrison Formation genus Caulodon (now a synonym of Camarasaurus). However, the two are not based on the same type, as "I". praecursor comes from slightly older rocks: the same unnamed Kimmeridgian formation as Morinosaurus. Earlier reviews (Romer, 1956; Steel, 1970) accepted it as a synonym of Pelorosaurus, and considered it a possible brachiosaurid.

In the 1990s, French researchers published on new camarasaurid bones from the same formation. At first, Buffetaut and Martin (1993) suggested that they belonged to Neosodon praecursor, but Le Loeuff et al. (1996) later rejected this, as Neosodon is based only on a tooth, which did not overlap the new material. The latest review accepted both Neosodon and "Iguanodon" praecursor as dubious sauropods. However, Royo-Torres et al. (2006), in their description of Turiasaurus, noted that this tooth was similar to those of their genus and suggested that it could be a turiasaur.

Paleobiology

The tooth is large (60 mm [2.36 in] tall and a cross-section of 35 by 20 mm (1.38 by 0.79 in) in its incomplete state, estimated at 80 mm [3.15 in] tall if complete) and spear-like or spatulate in shape. The owner would have been a large, quadrupedal herbivore.