page_title: Omeisaurus
section_title: Discovery
hierarchical_section_title: Omeisaurus / Discovery
caption_attribution_description: English: Restauration of Omeisaurus tianfuensis
context_page_description: Omeisaurus is a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic Period of what is now China. Its name comes from Mount Emei, where it was discovered in the lower Shaximiao Formation of Sichuan Province.
  Like other sauropods, Omeisaurus was herbivorous and large. It measured 20.2 metres long, and weighed 9.8 tonnes.
context_section_description: Omeisaurus was first described in 1939. It was named after the sacred mountain Omeishan, which is where the first fossil example of Omeisaurus was found. Most skeletons of Omeisaurus were found in the 1970s and 1980s, during the great “Chinese dinosaur rush”. There have been eight species of Omeisaurus named so far: O. junghsiensis, O. changshouensis, O. fuxiensis, O. tianfuensis, O. luoquanensis, O. maoianus, O. jiaoi, and O. puxiani. All of these but the last two were named after the locations where they were found. O. fuxiensis was the smallest species, measuring around 35 feet (11 m) long. O. tianfuensis had the longest neck of the genus, around 30 feet (9.1 m) long. The only dinosaur with a longer neck was Mamenchisaurus. Tail clubs have in 1988/1989 been referred to Omeisaurus tianfuensis, but Paul Upchurch in 2004 considered them possible Shunosaurus clubs. In their paper on Qijianglong, Xing et al. (2015) considered O. maoianus more closely related to Mamenchisaurus than to O. tianfuensis, a proposal supported by the cladistic analysis of Ren et al. (2018).
  Mounted skeletons of Omeisaurus are on display at the Zigong Dinosaur Museum in Zigong, Sichuan Province and at Beipei Museum, near Chongqing, both in China.
caption: O. tianfuensis
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