Pradhania

{{Short description|Extinct genus of dinosaurs}}

{{Italic title}}

{{Automatic taxobox

| name = Pradhania

| taxon = Pradhania

| fossil_range = Early Jurassic, {{fossil_range|Sinemurian}}

| image = Pradhania.png

| image_caption = Restoration

| authority = Kutty et al. 2007

| subdivision_ranks = Species

| subdivision =

• †P. gracilis Kutty et al. 2007 (type)

}}

Pradhania (named after Dhuiya Pradhan, a fossil collector at the Indian Statistical Institute) is a genus of massospondylid sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Sinemurian-age (Early Jurassic) Upper Dharmaram Formation of India. It was first named by T. S. Kutty, Sankar Chatterjee, Peter M. Galton and Paul Upchurch in 2007 and the type species is Pradhania gracilis. It was a sauropodomorph of modest size, only about four meters (13 ft) long, and is known from fragmentary remains.{{cite journal |last=Kutty |first=T.S. |author2=Sankar Chatterjee |author3=Peter M. Galton |author4=Paul Upchurch |year=2007 |title=Basal sauropodomorphs (Dinosauria: Saurischia) from the Lower Jurassic of India: their anatomy and relationships |journal=Journal of Paleontology |volume=81 |issue=6 |pages=1552–1574 |doi=10.1666/04-074.1 |bibcode=2007JPal...81.1218K |url=http://jpaleontol.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/81/6/1218 |archive-date=2011-09-29 |access-date=2009-06-06 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110929151920/http://jpaleontol.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/81/6/1218 |url-status=live |url-access=subscription }} It was originally regarded as a basal sauropodomorph but new cladistic analysis performed by Novas et al., 2011 suggests that Pradhania is a massospondylid. Pradhania presents two synapomorphies of Massospondylidae recovered in their phylogenetic analysis.{{Cite journal|author1=Fernando E. Novas |author2=Martin D. Ezcurra |author3=Sankar Chatterjee |author4=T. S. Kutty |year=2011 |title=New dinosaur species from the Upper Triassic Upper Maleri and Lower Dharmaram formations of central India |journal=Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh |volume=101 |issue=3–4 |pages=333–349 |doi=10.1017/S1755691011020093|bibcode=2010EESTR.101..333N }}