Augustinia No longer an armourd Sauropod.

[Takama]

After befriending a Palaeontologist on Facebook, I find this.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=432341946856050&set=a.364180560338856.87968.100002407459262&type=1&comment_id=1076923&offset=0&total_comments=2#!/thomas.holtz/posts/10101698867363038?comment_id=16399492&offset=0&total_comments=12&notif_t=feed_comment_reply

[ZoPteryx]

Shame.  Although it makes sense, no other sauropod is known to have had such elaborate armor.  I think this will be a particularly devastating blow to CollectA's Agustinia; I had always considered it to sort of be their "flagship figure".

[Derek Sohoza]

From what little I could find on agustinia, there wasn't much to go on in terms of deciding what it looked like, or which bones went where. It seems like quite the mistake anyhow. If those structures were on its back, wouldn't there have to be some evidence in the vertebrae?

[VD231991]

Mannion et al. (2013) and Bellardini & Cerda (2017) demonstrate that the supposed osteoderms of Agustinia are actually fragments of ribs and hip bones, including an ilium.

Mannion, P.D., Upchurch, P., Barnes, R.N., and Mateus, O., 2013. Osteology of the Late Jurassic Portuguese sauropod dinosaur Lusotitan atalaiensis (Macronaria) and the evolutionary history of basal titanosauriforms. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 168: 98–206. doi:10.1111/zoj.12029.

Bellardini, F., and Cerda, I.A., 2017. Bone histology sheds light on the nature of the "dermal armor" of the enigmatic sauropod dinosaur Agustinia ligabuei Bonaparte, 1999. The Science of Nature. 104 (1). doi:10.1007/s00114-016-1423-7. PMID 27942797.