Nibbling prehistoric herbivore sheds new light on Triassic diversity

A Triassic herbivore, known for its supposed similarities to a modern-day ostrich, has been revealed to have entirely different approach to feeding from previously thought, according to research at the University of Birmingham.

The new discovery reveals a much broader diversity of herbivore behaviour during the Triassic period than has been recognised to date.

Called Effigia, the animal was about the size of a gazelle and lived in North America around 205 million years ago. Its fossil remains were found in the Ghost Ranch Quarry in New Mexico in the 1940s, although the material was not formally described by palaeontologists until 2006.

The remains had been relatively poorly preserved in the quarry and the skull, in particular, was quite badly deformed, making accurate reconstruction problematic. Early analysis of the specimen concluded that it belonged to the group of reptiles that includes crocodylians and birds and which started to flourish in the Triassic period.

Although more closely related to crocodylians, Effigia’s lightweight body, elongated neck, large eyes and beak shared many similarities with a modern-day ostrich, leading researchers to believe the animal fed by pecking plant material from the ground.

But new analysis of the specimen, by experts at the University of Birmingham, has revealed this animal was probably an entirely different type of herbivore than previously thought. The work, carried out in partnership with experts at the University of Bristol, University College London, University of York, Virginia Tech and the Natural History Museum, is published in The Anatomical Record.

The team used new CT scans of Effigia’s skull which revealed a much more accurate reconstruction of the animal. This included new information about the shape of the skull, such as a more rounded, bulbous brain cavity and curved upper and lower jaws. Unlike an ostrich bill, which is more rounded, Effigia’s bill is more concave with jaws that open and close a bit like a pair of shears.

The team used this information to model the effects of different forces acting on the skull, including what happens when the animal pecks at the ground. By modelling the forces the skull would need to withstand in order to feed by pecking, the researchers calculated that Effigia’s skull would probably have shattered. Instead, they suggest, the animal would be more likely to use its jaws to snip off and nibble pieces of soft plant material such as young shoots, or ferns.

Lead researcher, Dr Jordan Bestwick, said: “The herbivores we already recognise in the Triassic period fed either by digging for roots, such as the pig-like aetosaurs, or reaching for leaves high up in the treetops, like the long-necked sauropods. These two-legged browsers with a weak bite are unique to this period and show a previously unrecognised diversity among the herbivores of this period.”

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Journal Reference:

1. Jordan Bestwick, Andrew S. Jones, Sterling J. Nesbitt, Stephan Lautenschlager, Emily J. Rayfield, Andrew R. Cuff, David J. Button, Paul M. Barrett, Laura B. Porro, Richard J. Butler. Cranial functional morphology of the pseudosuchian Effigia and implications for its ecological role in the Triassic. The Anatomical Record, 2021; DOI: 10.1002/ar.24827

Extinct swordfish-shaped marine reptile discovered

A team of international researchers from Canada, Colombia, and Germany has discovered a new marine reptile. The specimen, a stunningly preserved metre-long skull, is one of the last surviving ichthyosaurs — ancient animals that look eerily like living swordfish.

“This animal evolved a unique dentition that allowed it to eat large prey,” says Hans Larsson, Director of the Redpath Museum at McGill University. “Whereas other ichthyosaurs had small, equally sized teeth for feeding on small prey, this new species modified its tooth sizes and spacing to build an arsenal of teeth for dispatching large prey, like big fishes and other marine reptiles.”

“We decided to name it Kyhytysuka which translates to ‘the one that cuts with something sharp’ in an indigenous language from the region in central Colombia where the fossil was found, to honour the ancient Muisca culture that existed there for millennia,” says Dirley Cortes, a graduate student under the supervision of Hans Larsson and Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

The big picture of ichthyosaur evolution is clarified with this new species, the researchers say. “We compared this animal to other Jurassic and Cretaceous ichthyosaurs and were able to define a new type of ichthyosaurs,” says Erin Maxwell of the State Natural History Museum of Stuttgart (a former graduate student of Hans Larsson’s lab at McGill). “This shakes up the evolutionary tree of ichthyosaurs and lets us test new ideas of how they evolved.”

According to the researchers, this species comes from an important transitional time during the Early Cretaceous period. At this time, the Earth was coming out of a relatively cool period, had rising sea levels, and the supercontinent Pangea was splitting into northern and southern landmasses. There was also a global extinction event at the end of the Jurassic that changed marine and terrestrial ecosystems. “Many classic Jurassic marine ecosystems of deep-water feeding ichthyosaurs, short-necked plesiosaurs, and marine-adapted crocodiles were succeeded by new lineages of long-necked plesiosaurs, sea turtles, large marine lizards called mosasaurs, and now this monster ichthyosaur” says Dirley Cortes.

“We are discovering many new species in the rocks this new ichthyosaur comes from. We are testing the idea that this region and time in Colombia was an ancient biodiversity hotspot and are using the fossils to better understand the evolution of marine ecosystems during this transitional time,” she adds. As next steps the researchers are continuing to explore the wealth of new fossils housed in the Centro de Investigaciones Paleontológicas of Villa de Leyva in Colombia. “This is where I grew up,” says Cortes “and it is so rewarding to get to do research here too.”

Kyhytysuka video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5URorvooZCQ

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Journal Reference:

1. Dirley Cortés, Erin E. Maxwell, Hans C. E. Larsson. Re-appearance of hypercarnivore ichthyosaurs in the Cretaceous with differentiated dentition: revision of ‘Platypterygius’ sachicarum (Reptilia: Ichthyosauria, Ophthalmosauridae) from Colombia. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 2021; 1 DOI: 10.1080/14772019.2021.1989507

Tiny pterosaurs dominated Cretaceous skies

The babies of giant pterosaurs – known as flaplings – overshadowed their small adult rivals.

The newly hatched juveniles of large and gigantic pterosaurs likely outcompeted other smaller adult pterosaur species to dominate the Late Cretaceous period around 100 million years ago, a new study led by researchers from the University of Portsmouth has found.

Pterosaurs were the flying cousins of dinosaurs — some were as large as a Spitfire fighter plane and others as small as a thrush.

During the Triassic and Jurassic periods, 252 — 145 million years ago, pterosaurs reached only modest sizes, but by the Late Cretaceous period many were giants — some with a wingspan of 10 metres or more.

It had been previously thought that the smaller species of pterosaurs were outcompeted by newly evolving birds, but this research has found that it was actually the babies of giant pterosaurs — known as flaplings — who overshadowed their small adult rivals.

Lead author, Roy Smith, from the University of Portsmouth’s School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, worked on the study with scientists from Africa and the UK. The international team comprised of experts from the universities of Cape Town, Leicester, Portsmouth and Casablanca.

He said: “Over the last 10 years or so, we’ve been doing fieldwork in Morocco’s Sahara Desert and have discovered over 400 specimens of pterosaurs from the Kem Kem Group, highly fossiliferous sandstones famous worldwide for the spectacular dinosaur Spinosaurus.

“We’d found some really big pterosaur jaws and also specimens that looked like smaller jaws — about the size of a fingernail — but these tiny pterosaur remains could have just been the tips of big jaws so we had to do some rigorous testing to find out if they were from a small species or from tiny juveniles of large and giant pterosaurs.”

Roy and his colleagues examined five small jaw fragments and a neck vertebra using sophisticated microscope techniques to determine the age of the individual when the animal died.

Co-investigator, Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, is a world expert on the bone microstructure (histology) of pterosaurs and dinosaurs. She said: “By looking at the paper-thin section of the bones under a microscope, I could tell that they were from juveniles as the bone was fast growing and didn’t have many growth lines.

“We also examined the surface of the bones and found they had a rippled texture. This was further evidence they were the bones of immature individuals as mature pterosaur bones have an incredibly smooth surface once they are fully formed.”

The researchers also inspected the jaws and found that the number of tiny holes where nerves come to the surface for sensing their prey, known as ‘foramina’, were the same in the small jaws and the big jaws.

“This was more proof we were looking at the jaws of juveniles because if the specimens were just the tip of a jaw, there would be a fraction of the number of foramina,” said Roy.

Recent findings have suggested that hatchling pterosaurs could fly soon after hatching so they were quickly independent.

Professor David Martill of the University of Portsmouth said: “What really surprised me about this research is that the feeding ecology of these magnificent flying animals is more like that of crocodiles than of birds.

“With birds, there will be perhaps 10 different species of different sizes alongside a river bank — think kingfisher, little bittern, little egret, heron, goliath heron or stork for a large European river. There are several species all feeding on slightly different prey. This is called niche partitioning.

“Crocodiles on the other hand are much less diverse. On the river Nile, hatchling crocodiles feed on insects, and as they grow they change their diet to small fish, then larger fish and then small mammals, until a big adult Nile croc is capable of taking a zebra.

“There are lots of different feeding niches, but they are all occupied by one species at different stages of its life history. It seems that pterosaurs did something rather similar, occupying different niches as they grew — a much more reptilian rather than avian life strategy.

“It’s likely that the juvenile pterosaurs were feeding on small prey such as freshwater insects, tiny fishes and amphibians. As they grew they could take larger fishes — and who knows — the biggest pterosaurs might have been capable of eating small species of dinosaurs, or the young of large dinosaur species.”

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Journal Reference:

1. Roy E. Smith, Anusuya Chinsamy, David M. Unwin, Nizar Ibrahim, Samir Zouhri, David M. Martill. Small, immature pterosaurs from the Cretaceous of Africa: implications for taphonomic bias and palaeocommunity structure in flying reptiles. Cretaceous Research, 2021; 105061 DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2021.105061

‘Raptor-like’ dinosaur discovered in Australian mine, actually uncovered as a timid vegetarian

50-year-old findings of the Triassic period’s ‘largest meat-eating dinosaur’ reanalysed as the long-necked herbivore Prosauropod

Fossil footprints found in an Australian coal mine around 50 years ago have long been thought to be that of a large ‘raptor-like’ predatory dinosaur, but scientists have in fact discovered they were instead left by a timid long-necked herbivore.

University of Queensland palaeontologist Dr Anthony Romilio recently led an international team to re-analyse the footprints, dated to the latter part of the Triassic Period, around 220 million-year-ago.

“For years it’s been believed that these tracks were made by a massive theropod predator that was part of the dinosaur family Eubrontes, with legs over two metres tall,” Dr Romilio said.

“This idea caused a sensation decades ago because no other meat-eating dinosaur in the world approached that size during the Triassic period.”

However, findings made by a team of international researchers, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Historical Biology, in fact shows the tracks were instead made by a dinosaur known as a Prosauropod – a vegetarian dinosaur that were smaller, with legs about 1.4 metres tall and a body length of six metres.

The research team suspected there was something not-quite-right with the original size estimates and there was a good reason for their doubts.

“Unfortunately, most earlier researchers could not directly access the footprint specimen for their study, instead relying on old drawings and photographs that lacked detail,” Dr Romilio said.

The dinosaur fossils were discovered more than half a century ago around 200 metres deep underground at an Ipswich coal mine, just west of Brisbane.

“It must have been quite a sight for the first miners in the 1960s to see big bird-like footprints jutting down from the ceiling,” Dr Romilio said.

Hendrik Klein, co-author and fossil expert from Saurierwelt Paläontologisches Museum in Germany, said the footprints — referred to as ‘Evazoum’, scientifically, the footprint type made by prosauropod dinosaurs — were made on the water-sodden layers of ancient plant debris with the tracks later in-filled by silt and sand.

“This explains why today they occur in an upside-down position right above our heads,” Mr Klein said.

“After millions of years, the plant material turned into coal which was extracted by the miners to reveal a ceiling of siltstone and sandstone, complete with the natural casts of dinosaur footprints.”

The mine has long since closed, but fortunately, in 1964, geologists and the Queensland Museum mapped the trackway and made plaster casts, now used in current research.

“We made a virtual 3D model of the dinosaur footprint that was emailed to team members across the world to study,” Mr Klein said.

“The more we looked at the footprint and toe impression shapes and proportions, the less they resembled tracks made by predatory dinosaurs — this monster dinosaur was definitely a much friendlier plant-eater.

“This is still a significant discovery even if it isn’t a scary Triassic carnivore.

“This is the earliest evidence we have for this type of dinosaur in Australia, marking a 50-million-year gap before the first quadrupedal sauropod fossils known.”

The dinosaur footprint is on display at the Queensland Museum, Brisbane.

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Materials provided by Taylor & Francis Group. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Anthony Romilio, Hendrik Klein, Andréas Jannel, Steven W. Salisbury. Saurischian dinosaur tracks from the Upper Triassic of southern Queensland: possible evidence for Australia’s earliest sauropodomorph trackmaker. Historical Biology, 2021; 1 DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2021.1984447

Early dinosaurs may have lived in social herds as early as 193 million years ago

Fossils indicate a communal nesting ground and adults who foraged and took care of the young as a herd, scientists say

To borrow a line from the movie “Jurassic Park:” Dinosaurs do move in herds. And a new study shows that the prehistoric creatures lived in herds much earlier than previously thought.

In a paper appearing in Scientific Reports, researchers from MIT, Argentina, and South Africa detail their discovery of an exceptionally preserved group of early dinosaurs that shows signs of complex herd behavior as early as 193 million years ago — 40 million years earlier than other records of dinosaur herding.

Since 2013, members of the team have excavated more than 100 dinosaur eggs (about the size of chicken eggs) and the partial skeletons of 80 juvenile and adult dinosaurs from a rich fossil bed in southern Patagonia.

Using X-ray imaging, they were able to examine the eggs’ contents without breaking them apart, and discovered preserved embryos within, which they used to confirm that the fossils were all members of Mussaurus patagonicus — a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the early Jurassic period and is classified as a sauropodomorph, a predecessor of the massive, long-necked sauropods that later roamed the Earth.

Surprisingly, the researchers observed that the fossils were grouped by age: Dinosaur eggs and hatchlings were found in one area, while skeletons of juveniles were grouped in a nearby location. Meanwhile, remains of adult dinosaurs were found alone or in pairs throughout the field site.

This “age segregation,” the researchers believe, is a strong sign of a complex, herd-like social structure. The dinosaurs likely worked as a community, laying their eggs in a common nesting ground. Juveniles congregated in “schools,” while adults roamed and foraged for the herd.

“This may mean that the young were not following their parents in a small family structure,” says team member Jahandar Ramezani, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “There’s a larger community structure, where adults shared and took part in raising the whole community.”

Ramezani dated ancient sediments among the fossils and determined that the dinosaur herd dates back to around 193 million years ago, during the early Jurassic period. The team’s results represent the earliest evidence of social herding among dinosaurs.

Living in herds may have given Mussaurus and other social sauropodomorphs an evolutionary advantage. These early dinosaurs originated in the late Triassic, shortly before an extinction event wiped out many other animals. For whatever reason, sauropodomorphs held on and eventually dominated the terrestrial ecosystem in the early Jurassic.

“We’ve now observed and documented this earliest social behavior in dinosaurs,” Ramezani says. “This raises the question now of whether living in a herd may have had a major role in dinosaurs’ early evolutionary success. This gives us some clues to how dinosaurs evolved.”

A fossil flood

Since 2013, paleontologists on the team have worked in the Laguna Colorada Formation, a site in southern Patagonia that is known for bearing fossils of early sauropodomorphs. When scientists first discovered fossils within this formation in the 1970s, they named them Mussaurus for “mouse lizard,” as they assumed the skeletons were of miniature dinosaurs.

Only much later did scientists, including members of the Argentinian team, discover bigger skeletons, indicating Mussaurus adults were much larger than their rodent namesakes. The name stuck, however, and the team has continued to unearth a rich collection of Mussaurus fossils from a small, square kilometer of the formation.

The fossils they have identified so far were found in three sedimentary layers spaced close together, indicating that the region may have been a common breeding ground where the dinosaurs returned regularly, perhaps to take advantage of favorable seasonal conditions.

Among the fossils they uncovered, the team discovered a group of 11 articulated juvenile skeletons, intertwined and overlapping each other, as if they had been suddenly thrown together. In fact, judging from the remarkably preserved nature of the entire collection, the team believes this particular herd of Mussaurus died “synchronously,” perhaps quickly buried by sediments.

Based on evidence of ancient flora in the nearby outcrops, the Laguna Colorada Formation has long been assumed to be relatively old on the dinosaur timescale. The team wondered: Could these dinosaurs have been herding from early on?

“People already knew that in the late Jurassic and Cretaceous, the large herbivore dinosaurs exhibited social behavior — they lived in herds and had nesting spots,” Ramezani says. “But the question has always been, when was the earliest time for such herding behavior?”

A gregarious line

To find out, Diego Pol, a paleontologist at the Egidio Feruglio Paleontological Museum in Argentina who led the study, looked for samples of volcanic ash among the fossils to send to Ramezani’s lab at MIT. Volcanic ash can contain zircon — mineral grains contaning uranium and lead, the isotopic ratios of which Ramezani can precisely measure. Based on uranium’s half-life, or the time it takes for half of the element to decay into lead, he can calculate the age of the zircon and the ash in which it was found. Ramezani successfully identified zircons in two ash samples, all of which he dated to around 193 million years old.

Since the volcanic ash was found in the same sediment layers as the fossils, Ramezani’s analyses strongly suggest that the dinosaurs were buried at the same time the ash was deposited. A likely scenario may have involved a flash flood or windblown dust that buried the herd, while ash from a distant eruption happened to drift over and, luckily for science, deposit zircons in the sediments.

Taken together, the team’s results show that Mussaurus and possibly other dinosaurs evolved to live in complex social herds as early as 193 million years ago, around the dawn of the Jurassic period.

Scientists suspect that two other types of early dinosaurs — Massospondylus from South Africa and Lufengosaurus from China — also lived in herds around the same time, although the dating for these dinosaurs has been less precise. If multiple separate lines of dinosaurs lived in herds, the researchers believe the social behavior may have evolved earlier, perhaps as far back as their common ancestor, in the late Triassic.

“Now we know herding was going on 193 million years ago,” Ramezani says. “This is the earliest confirmed evidence of gregarious behavior in dinosaurs. But paleontological understanding says, if you find social behavior in this type of dinosaur at this time, it must have originated earlier.”

This research was supported, in part, by National Science Foundation in the U.S. and the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina.

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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.

Journal Reference:

1. Pol, D., Mancuso, A.C., Smith, R.M.H. et al. Earliest evidence of herd-living and age segregation amongst dinosaurs. Sci Rep, 2021 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-99176-1

Who was king before Tyrannosaurus? Uzbek fossil reveals new top dino

Iconic tyrannosauroids like T. rex famously dominated the top of the food web at the end of the reign of the dinosaurs. But they didn’t always hold that top spot.

In a new study published in Royal Society Open Science, a research team led by the University of Tsukuba has described a new genus and species belonging to the Carcharodontosauria, a group of medium- to large-sized carnivorous dinosaurs that preceded the tyrannosauroids as apex predators.

The new dinosaur, named Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, was found in the lower Upper Cretaceous Bissekty Formation of the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan, and therefore lived about 90 million years ago. Two separate evolutionary analyses support classification of the new dinosaur as the first definitive carcharodontosaurian discovered in the Upper Cretaceous of Central Asia.

“We described this new genus and species based on a single isolated fossil, a left maxilla, or upper jawbone,” explains study first author Assistant Professor Kohei Tanaka. “Among theropod dinosaurs, the size of the maxilla can be used to estimate the animal’s size because it correlates with femur length, a well-established indicator of body size. Thus, we were able to estimate that Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis had a mass of over 1,000 kg, and was approximately 7.5 to 8.0 meters in length, greater than the length of a full-grown African elephant.”

This size greatly exceeds that of any other carnivore known from the Bissekty Formation, including the small-sized tyrannosauroid Timurlengia described from the same formation. Therefore, the newly named dinosaur likely topped the food web in its early Late Cretaceous ecosystem.

The genus’s namesake is fittingly regal; Ulughbegsaurus is named for Ulugh Beg, the 15th century mathematician, astronomer, and sultan of the Timurid Empire of Central Asia. The species is named for the country where the fossil was discovered.

Before the Late Cretaceous, carcharodontosaurians like Ulughbegsaurus disappeared from the paleocontinent that included Central Asia. This disappearance is thought to have been related to the rise of tyrannosauroids as apex predators, but this transition has remained poorly understood because of the scarcity of relevant fossils.

Senior author Professor Yoshitsugu Kobayashi at the Hokkaido University Museum explains “The discovery of Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis fills an important gap in the fossil record, revealing that carcharodontosaurians were widespread across the continent from Europe to East Asia. As one of the latest surviving carcharodontosaurians in Laurasia, this large predator’s coexistence with a smaller tyrannosauroid reveals important constraints on the transition of the apex predator niche in the Late Cretaceous.”

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Journal Reference:

1. Kohei Tanaka, Otabek Ulugbek Ogli Anvarov, Darla K. Zelenitsky, Akhmadjon Shayakubovich Ahmedshaev, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi. A new carcharodontosaurian theropod dinosaur occupies apex predator niche in the early Late Cretaceous of Uzbekistan. Royal Society Open Science, 2021; 8 (9): 210923 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.210923

500-million-year-old fossil represents rare discovery of ancient animal in North America

Many scientists consider the “Cambrian explosion” — which occurred about 530-540 million years ago — as the first major appearance of many of the world’s animal groups in the fossil record. Like adding pieces to a giant jigsaw puzzle, each discovery dating from this time period has added another piece to the evolutionary map of modern animals. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found a rare, 500-million-year-old “worm-like” fossil called a palaeoscolecid, which is an uncommon fossil group in North America. The researchers believe this find, from an area in western Utah, can help scientists better understand how diverse the Earth’s animals were during the Cambrian explosion.

Jim Schiffbauer, an associate professor of geological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science and one of the study’s co-authors, said that while this fossil has the same anatomical organization as modern worms, it doesn’t exactly match with anything we see on modern Earth.

“This group of animals are extinct, so we don’t see them, or any modern relatives, on the planet today,” Schiffbauer said. “We tend to call them ‘worm-like’ because it’s hard to say that they perfectly fit with annelids, priapulids, or any other types of organism on the planet today that we would generally call a “worm.” But palaeoscolecids have the same general body plan, which in the history of life has been an incredibly successful body plan. So, this is a pretty cool addition because it expands the number of worm-like things that we know about from 500 million years ago in North America and adds to our global occurrences and diversity of the palaeoscolecids.”

At the time, this palaeoscolecid was likely living on an ocean floor, said Wade Leibach, an MU graduate teaching assistant in the College of Arts and Science, and lead author on the study.

“It is the first known palaeoscolecid discovery in a certain rock formation — the Marjum Formation of western Utah — and that’s important because this represents one of only a few palaeoscolecid taxa in North America,” Leibach said. “Other examples of this type of fossil have been previously found in much higher abundance on other continents, such as Asia, so we believe this find can help us better understand how we view prehistoric environments and ecologies, such as why different types of organisms are underrepresented or overrepresented in the fossil record. So, this discovery can be viewed from not only the perspective of its significance in North American paleontology, but also broader trends in evolution, paleogeography and paleoecology.”

Leibach, who switched his major from biology to geology after volunteering to work with the invertebrate paleontology collections at the University of Kansas, began this project as an undergraduate student by analyzing a box of about a dozen fossils in the collections of the KU Biodiversity Institute. Initially, Leibach and one of his co-authors, Anna Whitaker, who was a graduate student at KU at the time and now is at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, analyzed each fossil using a light microscope, which identified at least one of the fossils to be a palaeoscolecid.

Leibach worked with Julien Kimmig, who was at the KU Biodiversity Institute at the time and is now at Penn State University, to determine that, in order to be able to confirm their initial findings, he would need the help of additional analyses provided by sophisticated microscopy equipment located at the MU X-ray Microanalysis Core, which is directed by Schiffbauer. Using the core facility at MU, Leibach focused his analysis on the indentations left in the fossil by the ancient animal’s microscopic plates, which are characteristic of the palaeoscolecids.

“These very small mineralized plates are usually nanometers-to-micrometers in size, so we needed the assistance of the equipment in Dr. Schiffbauer’s lab to be able to study them in detail because their size, orientation and distribution is how we classify the organism to the genus and species levels,” Leibach said.

Leibach said the team found a couple reasons about why this particular fossil may be found in limited quantities in North America as compared to other parts of the world. They are:

• Geochemical limitations or different environments that may be more predisposed to preserving these types of organisms.
• Ecological competition, which may have driven this type of organism to be less competitive or less abundant in certain areas.

The new taxon is named Arrakiscolex aasei after the fictional planet Arrakis in the novel “Dune” by Frank Herbert, which is inhabited by a species of armored worm and the collector of the specimens Arvid Aase.

The study, “First palaeoscolecid from the Cambrian (Miaolingian, Drumian) Marjum Formation of western Utah,” was published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, an international quarterly journal which publishes papers from all areas of paleontology. Funding was provided by a National Science Foundation CAREER grant (1652351), a National Science Foundation Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities grant (1636643), a University of Kansas Undergraduate Research grant, a student research grant provided by the South-Central Section of the Geological Society of America, and the J. Ortega-Hernández Laboratory for Invertebrate Palaeobiology at Harvard University. The study’s authors would like to thank Arvid Aase and Thomas T. Johnson for donating the specimens analyzed in the study.The new taxon is named Arrakiscolex aasei after the fictional planet Arrakis in the novel “Dune” by Frank Herbert, which is inhabited by a species of armored worm and the collector of the specimens Arvid Aase.

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Materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Wade Leibach, Rudy Lerosey-Aubril, Anna Whitaker, James Schiffbauer, Julien Kimmig. First palaeoscolecid from the Cambrian (Miaolingian, Drumian) Marjum Formation of western Utah. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 2021; 66 DOI: 10.4202/app.00875.2021

Massive new animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale

ROM palaeontologists unearth one of the largest radiodonts of the Cambrian explosion

Palaeontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have uncovered the remains of a huge new fossil species belonging to an extinct animal group in half-a-billion-year-old Cambrian rocks from Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies. The findings were announced on September 8, 2021, in a study published in Royal Society Open Science.

Named Titanokorys gainesi, this new species is remarkable for its size. With an estimated total length of half a meter, Titanokorys was a giant compared to most animals that lived in the seas at that time, most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger.

“The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling, this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found,” says Jean-Bernard Caron, ROM’s Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology.

Evolutionarily speaking, Titanokorys belongs to a group of primitive arthropods called radiodonts. The most iconic representative of this group is the streamlined predator Anomalocaris, which may itself have approached a metre in length. Like all radiodonts, Titanokorys had multifaceted eyes, a pineapple slice-shaped, tooth-lined mouth, a pair of spiny claws below its head to capture prey and a body with a series of flaps for swimming. Within this group, some species also possessed large, conspicuous head carapaces, with Titanokorys being one of the largest ever known.

“Titanokorys is part of a subgroup of radiodonts, called hurdiids, characterized by an incredibly long head covered by a three-part carapace that took on myriad shapes. The head is so long relative to the body that these animals are really little more than swimming heads,” added Joe Moysiuk, co-author of the study, and a ROM-based Ph.D. student in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto.

Why some radiodonts evolved such a bewildering array of head carapace shapes and sizes is still poorly understood and was likely driven by a variety of factors, but the broad flattened carapace form in Titanokorys suggests this species was adapted to life near the seafloor.

“These enigmatic animals certainly had a big impact on Cambrian seafloor ecosystems. Their limbs at the front looked like multiple stacked rakes and would have been very efficient at bringing anything they captured in their tiny spines towards the mouth. The huge dorsal carapace might have functioned like a plough,” added Dr. Caron, who is also an Associate Professor in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto, and Moysiuk’s Ph.D. advisor.

All fossils in this study were collected around Marble Canyon in northern Kootenay National Park by successive ROM expeditions. Discovered less than a decade ago, this area has yielded a great variety of Burgess Shale animals dating back to the Cambrian period, including a smaller, more abundant relative of Titanokorys named Cambroraster falcatusin reference to its Millennium Falcon-shaped head carapace. According to the authors, the two species might have competed for similar bottom-dwelling prey.

The Burgess Shale fossil sites are located within Yoho and Kootenay National Parks and are managed by Parks Canada. Parks Canada is proud to work with leading scientific researchers to expand knowledge and understanding of this key period of earth history and to share these sites with the world through award-winning guided hikes. The Burgess Shale was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 due to its outstanding universal value and is now part of the larger Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site.

The discovery of Titanokorys gainesi was profiled in the CBC’s The Nature of Things episode “First Animals.” These and other Burgess Shale specimens will be showcased in a new gallery at ROM, the Willner Madge Gallery, Dawn of Life, opening in December 2021.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Royal Ontario Museum. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. J.-B. Caron, J. Moysiuk. A giant nektobenthic radiodont from the Burgess Shale and the significance of hurdiid carapace diversity. Royal Society Open Science, 2021; 8 (9): 210664 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.210664

Newly identified mosasaur was fish-hunting monster

Researchers name species for husband-wife paleontologists in Kansas

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati identified a new species of mosasaur — an 18-foot-long fish-eating monster that lived 80 million years ago.

UC assistant professor-educator Takuya Konishi and his student, UC graduate Alexander Willman, named the mosasaur Ectenosaurus everhartorum after paleontologists Mike and Pamela Everhart. The mosasaur inhabited the Western Interior Seaway in what today is western Kansas.

The discovery was announced this week in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

The newly identified mosasaur marks only the second species in the genus Ectenosaurus.

“Mosasaurs in western Kansas have been well sampled and well researched. Those two factors create tall odds when you try to find something new,” Konishi said.

Mosasaurs were enormous marine reptiles, some as big as school buses. They inhabited oceans around the world during the Cretaceous period around the time of Tyrannosaurus rex. If Ectenosaurus clidastoides with its long, slender jaws resembles a gharial crocodile, Konishi said the new species is closer to a false gharial crocodile with notably blunter jaws.

Konishi, who teaches in the Biological Sciences Department of UC’s College of Arts and Sciences, first encountered the fossil in 2004 while working as a graduate student in systematics and evolution. Konishi was studying fossils of Platecarpus, a different genus of mosasaur in storage at Fort Hays State University’s Sternberg Museum of Natural History, when he recognized something odd about one specimen.

“It wasn’t a platecarpus. The frontal bone above the eye socket was much longer. The bones of Platecarpus should have had a broader triangle,” he said. “That was one telltale sign.”

Konishi suspected the specimen was a type of ectenosaur, only one species of which had been identified. But the teeth seemed all wrong. The now-empty sockets that would have contained the mosasaur’s sharp, curved teeth in the unidentified specimen would have extended around the front of its mouth, unlike other recognized species that has a toothless rostrum, the bony protuberance at the front of the mouth.

For years, the fossils puzzled him.

“Some things just stick in your mind and they’re hard to let go,” he said.

But the mystery would have to wait because Konishi was busy finishing his doctoral degree and launching an academic career that would bring him to UC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

The first mosasaur fossils were found in the Netherlands a half-century before anyone used the term “dinosaur.” Mosasaurs began to capture the nation’s attention after the Civil War when the nation’s premier paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, began to study Cretaceous limestone in Kansas in a partnership that became a bitter public feud. Since then, Kansas has become world-renowned for mosasaur research.

Generations of experts have come to Kansas to study its specimens, which are on display at museums around the world.

“It’s a famous place for mosasaur research. It’s quite well known,” Konishi said. “So I thought I don’t have to be the guy to place a stake. I’m sure someone will catch it. But nobody did.”

Ectenosaur is unusual for how few specimens have been found in the genus compared to other mosasaurs, Konishi said.

“In western Kansas we have over 1,500 mosasaur specimens. Out of those we can only find one specimen each representing these two species of ectenosaur,” Konishi said. “That’s sort of crazy.”

When Konishi confirmed with the Sternberg Museum that no other researchers were studying the specimen, he asked them to ship the fossils to UC. When he opened the carefully bubble-wrapped contents, his initial impressions were confirmed.

“By then I had looked at all the other known Platecarpus specimens under the sun, as it were. And this specimen was distinct from the others,” he said. “To me it was so obvious.”

At the same time, Konishi’s student Willman inquired about working on a research project. He received a UC Undergraduate STEM Experience grant to help with the taxonomic identification.

“I was beyond excited to be part of the discovery,” Willman said.

The third author on the study, Michael Caldwell, is a professor of biology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Willman illustrated the fossils in painstaking detail to help scientists understand the morphological differences that make the mosasaur unique.

“I was very happy with how he brought these broken bones to life,” Konishi said. “It helped make our case very convincing to anyone that this is something new that warrants the establishment of a new taxon.”

The researchers dedicated the project to the late Dale Russell, whose work has had a profound impact in North American mosasaur paleontology, Konishi said. But they named the mosasaur for the Everharts, a Kansas couple who have spent more than 30 years sharing their fossils with museums and leading research field trips in the fossil-rich Smoky Hill Chalk.

“We’re still in a little bit of shock at the news. It’s very exciting,” Pamela Everhart said.

“It’s a great honor,” said Mike Everhart, author of “Oceans of Kansas” about mosasaurs and other prehistoric life that inhabited the Western Interior Seaway during the Cretaceous Period.

Mosasaurs are very special to him, he said.

“The oceans would not have been a safe place for swimming in the Cretaceous,” he said. “Mosasaurs were the top predator in the ocean during those times.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Cincinnati. Original written by Michael Miller. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Alexander J. Willman, Takuya Konishi, Michael W. Caldwell. A new species of Ectenosaurus (Mosasauridae: Plioplatecarpinae) from western Kansas, USA, reveals a novel suite of osteological characters for the genus. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 2021; 741 DOI: 10.1139/cjes-2020-0175

Tyrannosaurus rex’s jaw had sensors to make it an even more fearsome predator

Tyrannosaurus rex was not just a huge beast with a big bite, it had nerve sensors in the very tips of its jaw enabling it to better detect — and eat — its prey, a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Historical Biology today finds.

“T. rex was an even more fearsome predator than previously believed,” explains lead author Dr Soichiro Kawabe, from the Institute of Dinosaur Research at Fukui Prefectural University, in Japan.

“Our findings show the nerves in the mandible (an area of the jaw) of Tyrannosaurus rex is more complexly distributed than those of any other dinosaurs studied to date, and comparable to those of modern-day crocodiles and tactile-foraging birds, which have extremely keen senses.

“What this means is that T. rex was sensitive to slight differences in material and movement; it indicates the possibility that it was able to recognize the different parts of their prey and eat them differently depending on the situation.

“This completely changes our perception of T. rex as a dinosaur that was insensitive around its mouth, putting everything and anything in biting at anything and everything including bones.”

Whilst the morphology of vessels and nerves in the jaw have been analysed in several fossil reptiles, this study is the very first investigation of the internal structure of the mandible of T. rex.

Dr Kawabe, who was joined by Dr Soki Hattori Assistant Professor at the Institute of Dinosaur Research, used computed tomography (CT) to analyse and reconstruct the distribution neurovascular canal of a fossil mandible of T. rex, which was originally found in Hell Creek Formation, Montana.

They then compared their reconstruction to other dinosaurs such as Triceratops, as well as living crocodiles and birds.

This enabled the researchers to describe the well-preserved canals that houses the vessels and nerves in dentary of Tyrannosaurus rex.

“The present study reveals the presence of neurovascular canals with complex branching in the lower jaw of Tyrannosaurus, especially in the anterior region of the dentary, and it is assumed that a similarly complex branching neurovascular canal would also be present in its upper jaw,” says Dr Kawabe.

He added: “The neurovascular canal with branching pattern as complex as that of the extant crocodilians and ducks, suggests that the trigeminal nervous system in Tyrannosaurus probably functioned as a sensitive sensor in the snout.

“It must be noted that the sensitivity of the snout in Tyrannosaurus may not have been as enhanced as that of the crocodilians because Tyrannosaurus lacks the thick neural tissue occupying the neurovascular canal unlike extant crocodiles.

“Nevertheless, the sensitivity of the snout of Tyrannosaurus was considerably greater than that of the ornithischian dinosaurs compared in this study.”

The results of the paper are consistent with analyses of the skull surface of another tyrannosaurid, Daspletosaurus, and the neurovascular canal morphology within the maxilla of allosaurid Neovenator, which indicate that the facial area of theropods may have been highly sensitive.

“These inferences also suggest that, in addition to predation, tyrannosaurids’ jaw tips were adapted to perform a series of behaviours with fine movements including nest construction, parental care, and intraspecific communication,” Dr Hattori adds.

Limitations of the study include the team not analysing the full mandible area of T. rex and other dinosaurs used for comparison, however as the proportion not researched is insignificant, the trend shown “should be a reasonable estimate.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Taylor & Francis Group. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Soichiro Kawabe, Soki Hattori. Complex neurovascular system in the dentary of Tyrannosaurus. Historical Biology, 2021; 1 DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2021.1965137