Gresslyosaurus

Gressly's lizard

• Gressly · Proper noun (Swiss German) · Amanz Gressly (Swiss geologist and palaeontologist)
• -o- · Latin/Greek · connecting vowel
• saurus · Greek · lizard

Gresslyosaurus was named in honour of Amanz Gressly (1814–1865), a pioneering Swiss geologist best known for developing the concept of sedimentary facies. Gressly discovered the original fossil material in Switzerland in the 19th century. The suffix -saurus comes from the Greek word "sauros" meaning "lizard," following the standard convention for dinosaur genus names. The name therefore translates literally as "Gressly's lizard."

Named by

Rütimeyer

Year named

1856

Period

Late Triassic

Stages

Norian – Rhaetian

Found in

Switzerland (and possibly Germany and France)

Gresslyosaurus is generally regarded as a junior synonym of Plateosaurus, the well-known Late Triassic plateosaurid sauropodiform from central Europe. It was a medium-to-large bipedal prosauropod (plateosaurid). The synonymy with Plateosaurus is widely accepted in modern literature, though some earlier works treated it as a distinct genus.