Amurosaurus riabinini (Amurosaurus of Riabinin) inhabited Earth in the latest Cretaceous,
74-65 million years ago. Amurosaurus was
a bipedal herbivorous dinosaur and a member of the family Hadrosauridae. Fossil bones of adults are very rare but the available remains show that Amurosaurus was about 12 meters long.
The first
remains were discovered by Cossacks in 1902 near the Kasatkino settlement (about
400 km away from Blagoveshchensk). The remains of a giant animal were in a thick layer on the right side of a river. Ten years later Russian paleontologists
carried out some successful excavations in the area but in the mid-twenties their
scientific research was completely stopped. Large-scale excavations resumed
only in the mid-eighties and a unique prehistorical herbivorous Amurosaurus was found within the Blagoveshchensk
city.
In 1991 Russian paleontologists Yuri Bolotsky and Sergei Kurzanov first described and named this dinosaur as «Amurosaurus riabinini» (Amurosaurus of Riabinin). The generic name is derived from the Amur River and the Greek word sauros ("lizard"). The specific name was given in honor of the late Russian paleontologist Anatoliy Riabinin who described first discoveries of fossil bones of dinosaurs found in that region.