WWD: Polacanthus foxii
Added 2023-05-20 03:32:39 +0000 UTCThis is another one of those wastebasket nightmare taxa which plagues the series, although it's not quite as bad as Ornithocheirus or any of the "Cruel Sea" species. The episode presents two species of Polacanthus, an American one and a European one, but the American species is now considered a different genus known as Hoplitosaurus, which was largely synonymized with Polacanthus in the 80s-90s before being reestablished as valid. The American dub for the series renames the American Polacanthus as Gastonia, which also works better, although later studies found Gastonia lived a while before the Barremian, alongside its contemporary Utahraptor (we'll get to that soon).
In any case, many nodosaur fossils from the Early Cretaceous of United Kingdom and Spain were considered as belonging to Polacanthus, but a 2020 review of the genus and all the specimens attributed to it found that none of these fossils could be conclusively tied to the genus aside from the holotype specimen. I'll probably still include it though, just for completion's sake. In any case, this is the English species; although it lends its name to an entire subfamily, it's not well-known and its exact appearance rather obscure. For example, its skull is entirely unknown, although I've given it more of a horned appearance here versus the horse-like appearance it had in the episode.
