Vulcanodon (meaning "volcano tooth") is an extinct genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Early Jurassic Uppermost Forest Sandstone of southern Africa.

As a quadrupedal, ground-dwelling herbivore, Vulcanodon already showed the typical sauropod body plan with column-like legs and a long neck and tail.

Vulcanodon is known from a fragmentary skeleton including much of the pelvic girdle, hindlimbs, forearms, and tail, but lacking the trunk and neck vertebrae as well as the skull.

The tail vertebra bodies already showed an incipient excavation of their lateral sides, saving weight and giving them a waisted appearance when viewed from below.

For example, an elongating of the ilium, size reduction of the lesser trochanter shelf, and semiplantigrade posture are some features that indicate the amount and positioning of leg muscles being modified.

[17] The skeleton (catalogue number QG24) has been found weathering out of a hill slope and was partially eroded by surface exponation and plant roots, erroneously documented as sandwiched between two basalt layers.

[1] It includes the pelvis and sacrum, most of the left hind limb and foot, a right thigh bone, and twelve anterior tail vertebrae.

[10] Later, the site was revisited by the scientists Geoffrey Bond and Michael Cooper, who were able to collect additional remains including a scapula (specimen QG152, a shoulder blade) and a fragment of a neck vertebra.

He argued that the Vulcanodon carcass might have been embedded with the head and neck bended backwards above the pelvis, a posture called death pose that is frequently seen in dinosaur skeletons.

[20] Paul Upchurch (1995) showed that Barapasaurus was more closely related to later, more advanced sauropods than to Vulcanodon, rendering the Vulcanodontidae polyphyletic and therefore invalid.

Ronan Allain and colleagues (2004, 2008) found that Vulcanodon is most closely related to Tazoudasaurus, a newly discovered sauropod genus from Morocco.

[22][23] Adam Yates (2004) described a single sauropod tail vertebra from the Upper Elliot Formation of South Africa that may belong to a genus closely related to Vulcanodon.

[24] Vulcanodon in a cladogram after Nair et al., 2012:[25] Vulcanodon Tazoudasaurus Spinophorosaurus Barapasaurus Rhoetosaurus Shunosaurus Patagosaurus Omeisaurus Mamenchisaurus Losillasaurus Haplocanthosaurus Neosauropoda During the later part of the Lower Jurassic, southern Africa was the scene of massive volcanism, resulting in extensive lava flows (so called flood basalts) that covered much of southern Africa and Antarctica.

[10] It was long assumed that Vulcanodon lived during the lowermost (earliest) part of the Jurassic (the Hettangian stage) or at the Triassic–Jurassic boundary, approximately 200 million years ago.

[27] Adam Yates (2004) has recently shown that Vulcanodon is actually much younger than previously thought, dating to the uppermost (latest) part of the Lower Jurassic during the Toarcian stage, approximately 175–183 million years ago.

[24] In 2018 was revelated that as in 2016 Lake Kariba hosted record-low water levels the unit were accessible to be studied and confirmed that the holotype came from the uppermost Forest Sandstone, being as old as the Rhaetian or as young as the Pliensbachian, with a Sinemurian-Pliensbachian Midpoint.

The sediments in which Vulcanodon was found may represent distal alluvial fan deposits which levelled off into a desert landscape, which may have contained lakes during the wet season.

[6] Initially, sauropods were thought to be mainly aquatic, inhabiting lush peat swamps and being captive to the buoyancy of water to support their giant body weights.