Study sheds light on the evolution of the earliest dinosaurs
The classic dinosaur family tree has two subdivisions of early dinosaurs at its base: the Ornithischians, or bird-hipped dinosaurs, which include the later Triceratops and Stegosaurus; and the Saurischians, or lizard-hipped dinosaurs, such as Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus.
In 2017, however, this classical view of dinosaur evolution was thrown into question with evidence that perhaps the lizard-hipped dinosaurs evolved first — a finding that dramatically rearranged the first major branches of the dinosaur family tree.
Now an MIT geochronologist, along with paleontologists from Argentina and Brazil, has found evidence to support the classical view of dinosaur evolution. The team’s findings are published today in the journal Scientific Reports.
The team reanalyzed fossils of Pisanosaurus, a small bipedal dinosaur that is thought to be the earliest preserved Ornithiscian in the fossil record. The researchers determined that the bird-hipped herbivore dates back to 229 million years ago, which is also around the time that the earliest lizard-hipped Saurischians are thought to have appeared.advertisement
The new timing suggests that Ornithiscians and Saurischians first appeared and diverged from a common ancestor at roughly the same time, giving support to the classical view of dinosaur evolution.
The researchers also dated rocks from the Ischigualasto Formation, a layered sedimentary rock unit in Argentina that is known for having preserved an abundance of fossils of the very earliest dinosaurs. Based on these fossils and others across South America, scientists believe that dinosaurs first appeared in the southern continent, which at the time was fused together with the supercontinent of Pangaea. The early dinosaurs are then thought to have diverged and fanned out across the world.
However, in the new study, the researchers determined that the period over which the Ischigualasto Formation was deposited overlaps with the timing of another important geological deposit in North America, known as the Chinle Formation.
The middle layers of the Chinle Formation in the southwestern U.S. contain fossils of various fauna, including dinosaurs that appear to be more evolved than the earliest dinosaurs. The bottom layers of this formation, however, lack animal fossil evidence of any kind, let alone early dinosaurs. This suggests that conditions within this geological window prevented the preservation of any form of life, including early dinosaurs, if they walked this particular region of the world.
“If the Chinle and Ischigualasto formations overlap in time, then early dinosaurs may not have first evolved in South America, but may have also been roaming North America around the same time,” says Jahandar Ramezani, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, who co-authored the study. “Those northern cousins just may not have been preserved.”
The other researchers on the study are first author Julia Desojo from the National University of La Plata Museum, and a team of paleontologists from institutions across Argentina and Brazil.
“Following footsteps”
The earliest dinosaur fossils found in the Ischigualasto Formation are concentrated within what is now a protected provincial park known as “Valley of the Moon” in the San Juan Province. The geological formation also extends beyond the park, albeit with fewer fossils of early dinosaurs. Ramezani and his colleagues instead looked to study one of the accessible outcrops of the same rocks, outside of the park.
They focused on Hoyada del Cerro Las Lajas, a less-studied outcrop of the Ischigualasto Formation, in La Rioja Province, which another team of paleontologists explored in the 1960s.
“Our group got our hands on some of the field notes and excavated fossils from those early paleontologists, and thought we should follow their footsteps to see what we could learn,” Desojo says.
Over four expeditions between 2013 to 2019, the team collected fossils and rocks from various layers of the Las Lajas outcrop, including more than 100 new fossil specimens, though none of these fossils were of dinosaurs. Nevertheless, they analyzed the fossils and found they were comparable, in both species and relative age, to nondinosaur fossils found in the park region of the same Ischigualasto Formation. They also found out that the Ischigualasto Formation in Las Lajas was significantly thicker and much more complete than the outcrops in the park. This gave them confidence that the geological layers in both locations were deposited during the same critical time interval.
Ramezani then analyzed samples of volcanic ash collected from several layers of the Las Lajas outcrops. Volcanic ash contains zircon, a mineral that he separated from the rest of the sediment, and measured for isotopes of uranium and lead, the ratios of which yield the mineral’s age.
With this high-precision technique, Ramezani dated samples from the top and bottom of the outcrop, and found that the sedimentary layers, and any fossils preserved within them, were deposited between 230 million and 221 million years ago. Since the team determined that the layered rocks in Las Lajas and the park match in both species and relative timing, they could also now determine the exact age of the park’s more fossil-rich outcrops.
Moreover, this window overlaps significantly with the time interval over which sediments were deposited, thousands of kilometers northward, in the Chinle Formation.
“For many years, people thought Chinle and Ischigualasto formations didn’t overlap, and based on that assumption, they developed a model of diachronous evolution, meaning the earliest dinosaurs appeared in South America first, then spread out to other parts of the world including North America,” Ramezani says. “We’ve now studied both formations extensively, and shown that diachronous evolution isn’t really based on sound geology.”
A family tree, preserved
Decades before Ramezani and his colleagues set out for Las Lajas, other paleontologists had explored the region and unearthed numerous fossils, including remains of Pisanosaurus mertii, a small, light-framed, ground-dwelling herbivore. The fossils are now preserved in an Argentinian museum, and scientists have gone back and forth on whether it is a true dinosaur belonging to the Ornithiscian group, or a ” basal dinosauromorph” — a kind of pre-dinosaur, with features that are almost, but not quite fully, dinosaurian.
“The dinosaurs we see in the Jurassic and Cretaceous are highly evolved, and ones we can nicely identify, but in the late Triassic, they all looked very much alike, so it’s very hard to distinguish them from each other, and from basal dinosauromorphs,” Ramezani explains.
His collaborator Max Langer from the University of São Paulo in Brazil painstakingly reanalyzed the museum-preserved fossil of Pisanosaurus, and concluded, based on certain key anatomical features, that it is indeed a dinosaur — and what’s more, that it is the earliest preserved Ornithiscian specimen. Based on Ramezani’s dating of the outcrop and the interpretation of Pisanosaurus, the researchers concluded that the earliest bird-hipped dinosaurs appeared around 229 million years ago — around the same time as their lizard-hipped counterparts.
“We can now say the earliest Ornithiscians first showed up in the fossil record roughly around the same time as the Saurischians, so we shouldn’t throw away the conventional family tree,” Ramezani says. “There are all these debates about where dinosaurs appeared, how they diversified, what the family tree looked like. A lot of those questions are tied to geochronology, so we need really good, robust age constraints to help answer these questions.”
This research was mainly funded by the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Argentina) and the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation (Brazil). Geochronologic research at the MIT Isotope Lab has been supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
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Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original written by Jennifer Chu. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
What happens in Vegas, may come from the Arctic?
A cave deep in the wilderness of central Nevada is a repository of evidence supporting the urgent need for the Southwestern U.S. to adopt targets aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a new UNLV study finds.
UNLV climate scientist Matthew Lachniet and colleagues have compiled a detailed, 13,000-year climate history from stalagmite specimens in Leviathan Cave, located in the southern Great Basin, which provides clues for the mitigation of climate change today.
These ancient climate records show that Nevada was even hotter and drier in the past than it is today, and that one 4,000-year period in particular may represent a true, “worst-case” scenario picture for the Southwest and the Colorado River Basin — and the millions of people who rely on its water supply.
At that time, the long-term hot and dry climate of the region was linked to warm Arctic seas and a lack of sea ice, as well as warming in the western tropical Pacific Ocean, the cave record shows.
This parallels today and the near future, as the release of human carbon emissions into the atmosphere will warm the Arctic and possibly the western tropical Pacific, and is expected to result in long-term arid conditions for Nevada and the broader Colorado River Basin.
If the arid conditions become permanent, then the water supply in the Colorado River Basin is expected to decrease, which researchers say would imperil critical water resources for millions of people who live in the Southwest U.S.
“The last few decades have seen increasingly severe ‘hot droughts’ in the Colorado River Basin, when high temperatures coincide with less rainfall, and which have startled climate scientists and water policy managers,” Lachniet said. “But these dry intervals don’t usually last more than a few decades. In contrast, our new data show that Nevada climate can experience an extended interval of aridity for thousands of years, not just a few decades.”
The recent Southwestern U.S. drought that began in 2001, which has resulted in historic low reservoir levels in Lake Mead, is one indicator of the gravity of the problem. The Colorado River and Rio Grande basins are critical human support systems as their headwaters in the Rocky Mountains supply snow-fed water for myriad economic uses and support 56 million residents throughout the region.
“‘Business as usual’ scenarios for anthropogenic warming carry the risk of tipping the Southwest into an extended state of aridification,” researchers wrote.
The paper, published in the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, provides a clearer and more comprehensive picture of the Southwest’s climate history compared to tree ring records which extend only 2,000 years into the past.
Stalagmites — like those located in Leviathan Cave — are common cave formations that act as ancient rain gauges to record historic climate data. Stalagmites grow upward at rates of inches every few hundred years as mineral-rich waters seep through the ground above and drop from the tips of stalactites on cave ceilings.
These deposits more accurately represent a long-term shift toward a more arid climate as they hold data that extends deeper into the past.
A former analysis of one tree ring record, for example, pointed to a 10-year drought in the Medieval era as being a “worst case” predictor of a future, comparable drought, as compared to the more persistent and sustained 4,000-year period of aridity presented in Lachniet’s new study.
Regionally, paleoclimate records from other sources like lakes, landforms, pollen, and others, also support the conclusion of warmth and aridity during the same 4,000-year period.
Researchers also found that the Leviathan Cave region, where the stalagmite specimen was collected, is representative of climate conditions in most of the Mojave Desert and the southern Great Basin, and that the data has implications for the broader desert region.
Lachniet and colleagues say that their study can be a resource for policymakers today in adopting measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions which will in turn “minimize oceanic and Arctic warming.”
“There already is evidence that droughts in the Southwest are partly caused by humans because of the higher temperatures and more evaporation in surface waters like Lake Mead,” Lachniet said. “The new fossil-fuel climate might end up making these droughts permanent.”
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Materials provided by University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Original written by Natalie Bruzda. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Growth rate of common trilobites
If you’ve ever held a trilobite fossil, seen one in a classroom, or walked by one in a store, chances are it was Elrathia kingii, one of the most common and well-recognized trilobites, and collected by the hundreds of thousands in western Utah. But despite the popularity of this species, scientists had not determined how it grew — from hatchling to juvenile to adult — until now. New work from the American Museum of Natural History published today in the journal Papers in Palaeontology describes the development and growth rate of Elrathia kingii — only the second such dataset to be compiled for a trilobite — allowing for the first comparison among trilobite species.
“There’s quite a big size range among trilobites. Some never got bigger than about a centimeter, while the largest on record is 72 centimeters (28 inches),” said Melanie Hopkins, an associate curator in the Museum’s Division of Paleontology and the study’s author. “Growth-rate studies like this one can help us tackle some of the big-picture questions: How did some trilobites get so big? What was the environmental context for that? And how did body size evolve over the evolutionary history of the clade?”
Trilobites are a group of extinct marine arthropods — distantly related to the horseshoe crab — that lived for almost 300 million years. They were incredibly diverse, with more than 20,000 described species. Their fossilized exoskeletons are preserved in sites all over the world, from the United States to China. Like insects, they molted throughout their lifetimes, leaving clues to how they changed during development. But to calculate the species’ growth rate, scientists need fossils representing all stages of the animal’s life — and lots of them.advertisement
“There are tons of specimens of Elrathia kingii out there but most of them are adults, and data from exactly where they were collected is inconsistent,” Hopkins said. “I needed material that I could collect from as small a section as possible that included a lot of juveniles.”
So in May 2018, Hopkins spent five days in Utah with a crew consisting of Museum staff and volunteers at a new fossil site said to preserve bucketloads of Elrathia kingii. By the end of the trip, they had collected about 500 specimens — many of them juveniles, which can be as small as half a millimeter long — from a section of outcrop just 1.5 meters (about 5 feet) long.
Hopkins estimated the growth rate and compared it to previously published data on a different trilobite, Aulacopleura konincki — the first time two trilobite species have been compared in this way. The two species look very similar and Hopkins found that they also grow in similar ways: for example, the growth of the trunk — the area immediately below the trilobite’s head made up of segments that increase with age — was controlled by a growth gradient, with those that were younger and closer to the back of the body undergoing faster growth. But while Elrathia kingii was smaller in early development and went through fewer molts before adulthood, it had faster growth rates, ultimately reaching sizes on par with Aulacopleura konincki, the largest of which are about 4 centimeters long.
In future studies, Hopkins is planning to add growth-rate data on different, more diverse-looking trilobite species to her models.
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Fossil jawbone from Alaska is a rare case of a juvenile Arctic dromaeosaurid dinosaur
A small piece of fossil jawbone from Alaska represents a rare example of juvenile dromaeosaurid dinosaur remains from the Arctic, according to a study published July 8, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza of the Imperial College London, UK, and co-authors Anthony R. Fiorillo, Ronald S. Tykoski, Paul J. McCarthy, Peter P. Flaig, and Dori L. Contreras.
Dromaeosaurids are a group of predatory dinosaurs closely related to birds, whose members include well-known species such as Deinonychus and Velociraptor. These dinosaurs lived all over the world, but their bones are often small and delicate and rarely preserve well in the fossil record, complicating efforts to understand the paths they took as they dispersed between continents.
The Prince Creek Formation of northern Alaska preserves the largest collection of polar dinosaur fossils in the world, dating to about 70 million years ago, but the only dromaeosaurid remains found so far have been isolated teeth. The jaw fossil described in this study is a mere 14mm long and preserves only the tip of the lower jaw, but it is the first known non-dental dromaeosaurid fossil from the Arctic. Statistical analysis indicates this bone belongs to a close relative of the North American Saurornitholestes.
North American dromaeosaurids are thought to trace their origins to Asia, and Alaska would have been a key region for the dispersal of their ancestors. This new fossil is a tantalizing clue toward understanding what kinds of dromaeosaurs inhabited this crucial region. Furthermore, the early developmental stage of the bone suggests this individual was still young and was likely born nearby; in contrast to previous suggestions that this part of Alaska was exclusively a migratory pathway for many dinosaurs, this is strong evidence that some dinosaurs were nesting here. The authors suggest that future findings may allow a more complete understanding of these mysterious Arctic dromaeosaurids.
Chiarenza summarizes: “There are places where dinosaur fossils are so common that a scrap of bone, in most cases, cannot really add anything scientifically informative anymore: this is not the case with this Alaskan specimen. Even with such an incomplete jaw fragment, our team was not only able to work out the evolutionary relationships of this dinosaur, but also to picture something more on the biology of these animals, ultimately gaining more information on this Ancient Arctic ecosystem.” Fiorillo adds: “Years ago when dinosaurs were first found in the far north, the idea challenged what we think we know about dinosaurs. For some time afterwards, there was a great debate as to whether or not those Arctic dinosaurs migrated or lived in the north year round. All of those arguments were somewhat speculative in nature. This study of a predatory dinosaur jaw from a baby provides the first physical proof that at least some dinosaurs not only lived in the far north, but they thrived there. One might even say, our study shows that the ancient north was a great place to raise a family and now we have to figure out why.”
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Different tracks, same dinosaurs: Researchers dig deeper into dinosaur movements
When picturing dinosaur tracks, most people imagine a perfectly preserved mold of a foot on firm layer of earth. But what if that dinosaur was running through mud, sinking several inches — or even up to their ankles — into the ground as it moved?
Using sophisticated X-ray-based technology, a team of Brown University researchers tracked the movements of guineafowl to investigate how their feet move below ground through various substrates and what those findings could mean for understanding fossil records left behind by dinosaurs.
They found that regardless of the variability in substrates, or the guineafowl moving at different speeds, sinking at different depths or engaging in different behaviors, the birds’ overall foot movement remained the same: The toes spread as they stepped onto the substrate surface, remained spread as the foot sank, collapsed and drew back as they were lifted from the substrate, and exited the substrate in front of the point of entry, creating a looping pattern as they walked.
And part of what that means is that fossilized dinosaur tracks that look distinct from each other, and appear to be from different species, might instead come from the same dinosaurs.
“This is the first study that’s really shown how the bird foot is moving below ground, showing the patterns of this subsurface foot motion and allowing us to break down the patterns that we’re seeing in a living animal that has feet similar to those of a dinosaur,” said Morgan Turner, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown in ecology and evolutionary biology and lead author of the research. “Below ground, or even above ground, they’re responding to these soft substrates in a very similar way, which has potentially important implications for our ability to study the movement of these animals that we can’t observe directly anymore.”
The findings were published on Wednesday, July 1, in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
To make the observations, Turner and her colleagues, Professor of Biology and Medical Science Stephen Gatesy and Peter Falkingham, now at Liverpool John Moores University, used a 3D-imaging technology developed at Brown called X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM). The technology combines CT scans of a skeleton with high-speed X-ray video, aided by tiny implanted metal markers, to create visualizations of how bones and muscles move inside humans and animals. In the study, the team used XROMM to watch guineafowl move through substrates of different hydration and compactness, analyzing how their feet moved underground and the tracks left behind.
Sand, typically a dense combination of quartz and silica, does not lend itself well to X-ray imaging, so the team used poppy seeds to emulate sand. Muds were made using small glass bubbles, adding various amount of clay and water across 107 trials to achieve different consistencies and realistic tracks.
They added metal markers underneath the claws of the guineafowl to allow for tracking in 3D space. It’s these claw tips that the researchers think are least disturbed by mud flow and other variables that can impact and distort the form of the track.
Despite the variation, the researchers observed a consistent looping pattern.
“The loops by themselves I don’t think are that interesting,” Gatesy said. “People are like, ‘That’s nice. Birds do this underground. So what?’ It was only when [Turner] went back into it and said, ‘What if we slice those motion trails at different depths as if they were footprints?’ Then we made the nice connection to the fossils.”
By “slicing” through the 3D images of the movement patterns at different depths, the researchers found similarities between the guineafowl tracks and fossilized dinosaur tracks.
“We don’t know what these dinosaurs were doing, we don’t know what they were walking through exactly, we don’t know how big they were or how deep they were sinking, but we can make this really strong connection between how they were moving and some level of context for where this track is being sampled from within that movement,” Turner said.
By recognizing the movement patterns, as well as the entry and exit point of the foot through various substrates, the team says they’re able to gain a better understanding of what a dinosaur track could look like.
“You end up generating this big diversity of track shapes from a very simple foot shape because you’re sampling at different depths and it’s moving in complicated ways,” Gatesy said. “Do we really have 40 different kinds of creatures, each with a differently shaped foot, or are we looking at some more complicated interaction that leaves behind these remnants that are partly anatomical and partly motion and partly depth?”
To further their research, the team spent time at the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College in Massachusetts, which is home to an expansive collection of penetrative tracks discovered in the 1800s by geologist Edward Hitchcock.
Hitchcock originally believed that his collection housed fossil tracks from over 100 distinct animals. Because of the team’s work with XROMM, Gatesy now thinks it’s possible that at least half of those tracks are actually from the same dinosaurs, just moving their feet in slightly different ways or sampled at slightly different depths.
“Going to museum together and being able to pick out these features and say, ‘We think this track is low in the loop and we think this one is high,’ that was the biggest moment of insight for me,” Turner said.
Turner says she hopes their research can lead to a greater interest in penetrative tracks, even if they seem a little less pretty or polished than the tracks people are used to seeing in museums.
“They have so much information in them,” Turner said, “and I hope that this gives people a lens, a new way to view these footprints and appreciate the movement preserved within in them.”
This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation (EAR 1452119 to SMG and PLF; IOS 0925077 to SMG), a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Framework Programme to PLF, and the Bushnell Research and Education Fund to MLT.
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