Paleontologists have identified a new species of sauropod dinosaur, Mamenchisaurus sanjiangensis, from a partial skeleton discovered near Chongqing in southwest China, a find that sheds fresh light on sauropod evolution in East Asia.

The dinosaur lived during the Early Oxfordian age of the Jurassic, around 160 million years ago. The bones were recovered from purplish‑red silty mudstones in the middle portion of the Upper Shaximiao Formation, a well-known fossil‑bearing stratum of that region.

Despite being known only from a single partial skeleton, the researchers classify M. sanjiangensis as a “diverged mamenchisaurid,” closely related to other species within the Mamenchisaurus genus. According to the study’s lead author Hui Dai and colleagues at the Chongqing Institute of Paleontology,

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