figured by
Nopsca in 1915 In 1859 coal mine administrator Pawlowitsch notified the
University of Vienna that some fossils had been found in the
Gute Hoffnung mine at Muthmannsdorf in
Austria. A team headed by geologists
Eduard Suess and
Ferdinand Stoliczka subsequently uncovered numerous bones of several species, among them those of a
euornithopod dinosaur. Stored at the university museum, the finds remained undescribed until they were studied by
Emanuel Bunzel from 1870 onwards. Bunzel in 1871 named the euornithopod a new species of
Iguanodon:
Iguanodon suessii. The
specific name honours Suess and is today more often spelled
suessi. In 1881
Harry Govier Seeley named a separate genus:
Mochlodon. The generic name is derived from Greek
mokhlos, "bar", and
odon, "tooth", a reference to the bar-like median ridge on the teeth. The
type species is
Mochlodon suessi.
Mochlodon and
Struthiosaurus, the latter found at the same site, are so far the only dinosaur genera named from Austrian finds. The
type specimen PIUW 2349 was found in the
Grünbach Formation of the
Gosau Group dating from the Lower
Campanian, about 80 million years old. It consists of a
dentary, two
vertebrae (presently lost), a parietal, a scapula, an ulna, a manual
ungual, a femur and a tibia. Bunzel did not assign a
holotype. In 2005 the dentary was chosen as the
lectotype. of
M. suessi At the end of the nineteenth century Baron
Franz Nopcsa noted the similarity of fossils found in
Romania to both the French
Rhabdodon and the Austrian
Mochlodon. In 1899 he named some of these
Mochlodon inkeyi, the specific name honouring
Béla Inkey, but the same year changed the name into
Rhabdodon inkeyi. In 1900 Nopcsa named some Romanian remains
Mochlodon robustum (emended to
M. robustus in 1990 by George Olshevsky). In 1915 however, he concluded that all this material could be referred to
Rhabdodon, the Austrian remains to
Rhabdodon priscus. In later years,
Mochlodon was often considered a
nomen dubium. In 2003, when
M. robustus was renamed
Zalmoxes,
Mochlodon was tentatively reinstated as a separate genus for the species
Mochlodon suessi. In 2005 a study concluded that no unique derived features,
autapomorphies, could be established for
Mochlodon in relation to
Zalmoxes, assigning the Austrian remains provisionally to a
Zalmoxes sp.; a definite identification would give
Mochlodon nomenclatural priority. A second species,
M. vorosi, was described from the
Santonian aged
Csehbánya Formation of
Hungary in 2012. In 2026,
Maidment and colleagues reassessed this species in the context of new cranial remains of the coeval
Ajkaceratops, and concluded that the
M. vorosi material represented the same taxon as
Ajkaceratops. As such, the former species is a
junior synonym of the latter, with the material representing a
ceratopsian dinosaur. == References ==