Fossil material now assigned to
Eucnemesaurus was once placed in a separate genus and
species,
Aliwalia rex (the
generic name was taken from the
Aliwal Park Reserve in the
Union of South Africa, where the first remains were found). The
fossil evidence of this species was comparably small, with for many years only
femoral fragments and a
maxilla known, having been sent from South Africa to
Austria in 1873 in a shipment with prosauropod bones. The size of the femur led many
palaeontologists to believe (along with the clearly carnivorous maxilla), that
Aliwalia was a
carnivorous dinosaur of remarkable size for the age in which lived. It would have been comparable to that of the large
Jurassic and
Cretaceous theropods, such as
Allosaurus, that evolved tens of millions of years after
Aliwalia. The original material was believed to bear a strong similarity to the
South American
Herrerasaurus, so much so that
Aliwalia was originally classified in
Herrerasauridae by
Peter Galton. However, later re-evaluation of the material has shown that the maxilla assigned to
Aliwalia does not, unlike the other material, belong to
Eucnemesaurus, as it is clearly from a carnivore. In addition, new material clearly demonstrates this latter genus' sauropodomorph affinities. ==References==