The holotype specimen of the Tambaitanis, MNHAH D-1029280 was initially discovered in August 2006, by Shigeru Murakami and Kiyoshi Adachi in the reddish mudstone bed of the Ohyamashimo Formation (Lower Formation of the Sasayama Group) on a riverbed of the Sasayama RIver in Kamitaki, Sannan-Cho, Tamba-Sasayama city, of Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan.[2] It took five field seasons, from 2006 to 2010 to excavate a fossil because access to the skeleton was only available during the winter when the water level of the river becomes lowest. It was originally called 'Tamba-Ryu' before the publication in 2014. The specimen is somewhat semi-articulated and includes teeth, a braincase, a dentary, an atlas, a fragmental cervical vertebra, dorsal ribs, two fragmental dorsal vertebrae, a pubis, an ilium, sacral spines, presumable first sacral ribs, 22 caudal vertebrae, and 17 chevrons.[1]
In 2014, Haruo Saegusa and Tadahiro Ikeda describedTambatitanis amicitiae as a new genus and species of titanosauriform sauropod based on these remains. The generic nameTambatitanis is derived from the words, Tamba, the city where the fossil was discovered, with the Ancient Greek word "titanis", meaning titan. The specific name, amicitiae was derived from the Latin word "amicitia", referring to the friendship between 2 discoverers of this fossil.[1]
Classification
Phylogenetic analysis from Saegusa and Ikeda (2014) suggests Tambatitanis was Euhelopodidae, but its specific placement is uncertain among this group due to polytomy shown in the matrix, which is mainly based on D'Emic (2012).[3] In contrast, the describers of Ruixinia recovered this taxon within Titanosauria based on their phylogenetic analysis in 2023, the cladogram of which can be seen below:[4]
^H. Saegusa, S. Tanaka, T. Ikeda, T. Matsubara, H. Frutani and K. Handa. 2008. On the occurrence of sauropod and some associated vertebrate fossils from the Lower Cretaceous Sasayama Group of Hyogo Prefecture, SW Japan. Journal of Fossil Research 41(1):2-12
^D'Emic, Michael D. (November 2012). "The early evolution of titanosauriform sauropod dinosaurs". Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 166 (3): 624–671. doi:10.1111/j.1096-3642.2012.00853.x. hdl:2027.42/94293.
^Kubota, Katsuhiro. "日本産の中生代恐竜化石目録 2022年版" [A list of Mesozoic dinosaur fossils from Japan in 2022] (PDF). Bulletin of the Gunma Museum of Natural History. 27: 157–170.