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So you want to draw Huanghetitanids?

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Here is a quick and dirty reference for Huanghetitan as well as the much larger "Huanghetitan". These are mysterious and poorly understood titanosauriforms, somewhat more basal than euhelopodids in evolutionary terms. The family "Huanghetitanidae" was coined by Lu, et. al. (2007) and though Mannion et. al. (2010) found it to be polyphyletic, I still believe it could be a valid family, based on similar sacral morphs once you account for distortion. The extremely well-preserved Dongyangosaurus, which includes complete hips, first caudal, and most of the dorsals, also probably belongs in this family. Its most defining feature is the hugely front-heavy ilia, so I reconstructed hypothetical hips for these two taxa in similar shape. I did both silhouettes the same shape, even though these may be different genera with different body proportions - they are not complete enough to be able to make any conclusions about how their overall shapes differed, and they do appear pretty closely related, without much noticeable difference in cross-scaling proportions.

Yes it's highly speculative. It's also the best huanghetitanid schematic there can be for now, at least until more specimens are formally published. So it's here just to give a rough idea of their likely proportions. Basically they came out looking like a halfway cross between Brachiosaurus and Euhelopus, which is pretty accurate considering where these animals fall on the sauropod family tree.

Given these proportions, H. liujiaxiaensis should have massed around 25 tons, and "H." ruyangensis around 70 tons. Again highly speculative since this assumes they had similar proportions, but there's not much data to work with either way.

As a side note, the anterior tail's small hump and the following steep dip both appear to be natural features in "Huanghetitan" ruyangensis. There was some crushing but I have reduced it. And yes, the sacrum really was that big when complete (only the last five neural spines and last four pairs of sacral ribs were recovered intact, out of six sacrals total, and titanosauriform sacrals were very front-heavy - so in fact this may be a conservative reconstruction). The famed "deepest body cavity" record attributed to "H." ruyangensis is exaggerated. The title is based on the ribs, which though very long, are actually shorter than those of Supersaurus and also the Potter Creek "Brachiosaurus sp." as reconstructed by Jensen - and they're also not unusually long for an animal of such gigantic size.

The dark gray bones are essentially placeholders, not existing fossils. The light gray bones are referable or possible "Huanghetitan" ruyangensis specimens mentioned in Lu, et. al. (2009), some of it heavily reconstructed (though the femur is complete). There is some referable neck material in one specimen, but I could find no good profile photos of any of those bones, so I decided not to attempt to draw them for now. The strangely convoluted and short cervical vertebrae on the highly speculative mounted skeletons of both species may be based on this material (with some of the bones probably being clone-casts of each other), but again hard confirmation of this is simply not available yet. We do know that the referred dorsal vertebra 41HIII-0008 is downright huge, probably from an individual the same size as the holotype, so the neck would probably have been a good bit longer than in the speculative mounts given that some of the upper cervical casts appear to be identical clones of lower cervicals.

Based on Lu, et. al. (2009), new sauropods were found in at least seven different rock layers in the rust-red Mangchuan formation of Ruyang County, including the holotype and referable "H." ruyangensis material, the possible euhelopodid Xianshanosaurus, and potentially several new titanosauriform genera still awaiting description.

I've seen a lot of wrong images of huanghetitanids that don't even look like titanosauriforms, so this is a pretty good basic guide to getting reasonable proportions if you really have an itch to show some love for these rare species and are sick of seeing cheesy diplodocid-clones or camarasaur-clones. Just make sure you ask me first before using this image for reference, and then, link to this image as well as include my name and avatar. Whether the tail had a whip-end like some titanosaurs is uncertain, it may have had a stiff straight end instead so you could draw it either way.

This image has also been credited as inspiration by:
spinoinwonderland.deviantart.c…


REFERENCES:

You, H., Li, D., Zhou, L., and Ji, Q. (2006). "Huanghetitan liujiaxiaensis, a New Sauropod Dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Hekou Group of Lanzhou Basin, Gansu Province, China". Geological Review. 52 (5): 668–674.

Lu J., Xu, L., Zhang, X., Hu, W., Wu, Y., Jia, S., and Ji, Q. (2007). "A New Gigantic Sauropod Dinosaur with the Deepest Known Body Cavity from the Cretaceous of Asia". Acta Geologica Sinica. 81 (2): 167.

Lü., J., Xu, L., Jiang, X., Jia, S., Li, M., Yuan, C., Zhang, X. and Ji, Q. (2009). "A preliminary report on the new dinosaurian fauna from the Cretaceous of the Ruyang Basin, Henan Province of central China." Journal of the Paleontological Society of Korea, 25: 43-56.
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PigsFly1010's avatar

What is the mass of this creature?