A “Uniquely Sucky Specimen,” This Smashed 205-Million-Year-Old Skull Demonstrates Early Dinosaur Diversity
The broken and bent fossil doesn’t look like much. Mutilated and distorted, it’s hard to believe it’s actually the skull of a dinosaur. “This is a particularly lousy specimen,” Virginia Tech undergraduate Simba Srivastava said in a news release. “If you saw a human skull like that, you would vomit.”
But according to an analysis by Srivastava and Sterling Nesbitt, a professor at Virginia Tech, the 210- to 205-million-year-old fossil — which was likely trampled before being buried — is not too crushed to study. Instead, it’s in good condition for reconstruction, with models revealing it came from a carnivorous dinosaur about three times his age. Tyrannosaurus rex.
Published in Articles in paleontology, The analysis provides important information about dinosaur diversity during the Triassic period (about 252 to 201 million years ago), before dinosaurs became the rulers of the Jurassic period (about 201 to 145 million years ago). The study even suggests that the late Triassic extinction between the two periods may have had a greater impact on dinosaurs than previously thought, which “would be interesting,” Srivastava said. Discover“because the general idea is that the major groups of dinosaurs did not disappear during this extinction. »
Learn more: What was the most dangerous carnivorous dinosaur?
Reconstructing a Crushed Skull
Discovered in the Upper Triassic deposits of New Mexico in 1982, the fossil remained stored at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pennsylvania for more than 30 years before being spotted by Nesbitt, who transferred the skull to Virginia Tech for further study.
Simba Srivastava, an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech, leveraged computed tomography (CT) technology to reconstruct the shattered skull.
(Image credit: Photo by Spencer Coppage for Virginia Tech)
“The specimen is a skull that appears to have hit a wall! The snout is pushed back on top of the skull, the jaws are folded over the left cheek and the braincase is flattened against the palate,” Srivastava explained. Discover. “Nevertheless, much of the skull is still there, including enough bone in the snout, jaws and around the eyes to get an idea of what its face looked like.”
Using computed tomography (CT) scans, Srivastava and Nesbitt constructed digital and 3D-printed reconstructions of the skull, which revealed that the specimen came from a carnivorous dinosaur with a broad skull and large cheekbones – features that had never been observed in Late Triassic dinosaurs. Based on this, the species (weighing approximately 45 to 90 pounds) was named for its unique characteristics, as well as its unusual preservation.
“We landed on Ptychotherates bucculentus“, Srivastava said in the statement, “which means “bent hunter with full cheeks” in Latin.
The last of a line
Analyzing the skull in more detail, Srivastava and Nesbitt determined that P. bucculentus was one of the last surviving species of Herrerasauria, a family of carnivorous dinosaurs from the Late Triassic, before dinosaurs became the primary predators of the Jurassic. During the Late Triassic, dinosaur carnivores were mostly small or medium-sized species that were outcompeted by larger predators, such as crocodiles and mammals.
According to the study, P. bucculents may have lived long enough to see the start of the Late Triassic extinction, making it one of the last of the Herrerasauria family. In fact, fossils of all other herrerasaurian species have been found so far in earlier Triassic deposits, and never in Jurassic deposits.
“This forces us to reconsider the impact of the end-Triassic extinction, as something that wiped out not only dinosaur competitors,” Srivastava said in the release, “but also some long-standing dinosaur lineages.”
According to Srivastava, there is still much to study in this skull, from the anatomy of its cheekbones to the shape and size of its brain. And more fossil discoveries could teach us more. But for now, the folded skull will remain one of the last traces of the Herrerasaurian lineage.
“This specimen fits in my hands, but it is the only evidence that one of these dinosaurs lived this long,” Srivastava added in the statement. “All those billions of individuals that have existed throughout time are represented by this one specimen.”
Learn more: How T. rex Came to rule the world
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