strongly elliptical shape seen in later sauropods such as Cetiosaurus. Wild concluded that Ohmdenosaurus shows a mosaic of primitive and derived features and probably needs to be placed within a new family of sauropods. A number of other basal sauropods have been described since, but relationships to these forms remain vague given the incompleteness of the Ohmdenosaurus specimen. In 1990, John Stanton McIntosh tentatively included Ohmdenosaurus in the Vulcanodontidae, noting that the tibia is very similar to that of the name-giving genus of the family, Vulcanodon. Later, however, the Vulcanodontidae has been demonstrated to be polyphyletic (does not form a natural group) and therefore fell out of use. Jay Nair and colleagues, in 2012, compared Ohmdenosaurus to the Australian genus Rhoetosaurus, noting that the tibiae of both genera are relatively slender as seen in later sauropods, unlike the more robust tibiae of other early genera. As Rhoetosaurus is geologically younger than Ohmdenosaurus, the latter would have been the earliest known sauropod with a slender tibia. The astragalus of Rhoetosaurus was found to be more similar to Ohmdenosaurus than to other sauropods. Sebastian Stumpf and colleagues, in 2015, reported fragmentary sauropod remains from the Toarcian of Grimmen in northeastern Germany, including four elements of the pelvic girdle and part of a vertebra. Although roughly contemporaneous with Ohmdenosaurus, they cannot be directly compared to the latter because they do not include elements of the hind limb. The Grimmen remains do, however, resemble those of the early sauropod Tazoudasaurus from Morocco, while Ohmdenosaurus appears to be closer to Rhoetosaurus. Stumpf and colleagues therefore suggested that Ohmdenosaurus and the Grimmen sauropod were not closely related to each other. Taphonomy Wild, in his 1978 description, attempted to reconstruct the taphonomy of the specimen – the events between the death and final deposition of the individual. Such reconstructions are important for the understanding of the formation of the Posidonia Shale as a unique fossil deposit. The tibia of Ohmdenosaurus shows two excavations caused by weathering that are deep. These excavations are located on the sidewards projecting upper and lower ends, but only on the medial (inner) side of the bone. This indicates that the bone must have laid on its lateral (outer) side and partly covered by sediment, only exposing the most protruding parts of the other side to the elements. Because similar weathering traces are unseen in other fossils from the Posidonia shale due to