Running Through the Delta

©Nobu Tamura

Basal ceratosaurs, and advanced ceratosaurs, happen to be some of my favorite theropods. Unfortunately, some of them tend to be missing large portions of their remains; the same can be said of any group of dinosaurs of course. Large African theropods seem to be typically missing large portions of their remains, which is regrettable and sad. However, advances in understanding African theropods have really been quite well documented in the past 20 years or so. In 1996 Paul Sereno, spending a lot of time in African during the late 90's, was busy documenting some of these advances in our knowledge. Throughout the 90's teams he led dug out important fossils all over the southern hemisphere and around the equator, but in 1996 he published a paper that separated some of those remains from a genus that Ernst Stromer, in 1934, had assigned as Bahariasaurus. The separation was based on other remains that had been discovered by Sereno and his team and then compared with remains of Bahariasaurus and other African dinosaurs. The exact phylogenetic position of the separated species, now known as Deltadromeus agilis is still up to some debate, and the lack of cranial material does not aid the taxonomic struggle at all. The fact that Deltadromeus may still be a junior synonym to Bahariasaurus still lingers in the background also. For the time being it will be treated as an independent genus however.