, 2023 In 1845, amateur geologists
William Guybon Atherstone and
Andrew Geddes Bain discovered several fossils near
Dassieklip,
Cape Province, in the
Bushman's River Valley. In 1849 and 1853, Bain sent some of the fossils to
palaeontologist Richard Owen for identification. Among them was an upper jaw Bain referred to as the "Cape
Iguanodon", so the site was named "Iguanodonhoek". Atherstone published a short paper about the discovery in 1857, but lamented in 1871 that it had thus far received no attention in London. In 1876 Owen named a series of specimens from the collection
Anthodon serrarius, basing the generic name on the resemblance of the teeth to a flower. The partial
holotype skull BMNH 47337, the left jaw BMNH 47338, the
matrix BMNH 47338 including bone fragments and impressions of the
anterior skull, and the
vertebrae BMNH 47337a were all assigned to
Anthodon. Lydekker in 1890 also corrected a mistake of Owen, who had incorrectly summarised all the material as coming from a single locality, whereas there was separate material from two clearly distinct localities.
Richard Owen, who described
Anthodon, thought it was a
dinosaur because dinosaurian skull material from the
Early Cretaceous had become associated with the Permian material. The dinosaur material was later separated out by
Robert Broom in 1912 and was renamed as the
stegosaurid Paranthodon by
Franz Nopcsa in 1929. A possible second species,
A. minusculus, was named by
Sidney Haughton in 1932 based on remains found in the
Cistecephalus other zone of the
Usili Formation in
Tanzania. Later authors have suggested that
A. minusculus may have been the same animal as
A. serratus.
Pareiasaurus parvus (Haughton, 1913) and
Propappus parvus (Haughton, 1913) were also synonymised with
Anthodon serrarius. ==Description==