SciNews has a story about a new species of dinosaur.  The new sauropod species is named Rhomaleopakhus turpanensis and it was identified from fossils found about 30 years ago.  The animal lived about 155 million years ago during the Late Jurassic Period.  All the details can be found in a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleotology.

It was a member of the family Mamenchisauridae, a group of sauropod (herbivorous long-necked) dinosaurs known from the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous of Asia and Africa.

“These dinosaurs added extra vertebrae to their necks to elongate them, and in addition to this made each individual neck vertebra longer,” Professor Paul Barrett, a paleontologist in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London and the Department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum, London, said in a statement.

“We don’t know why they did this, but we presume it was either a feeding adaptation or sexual selection.”