Skulls of new dinosaur species found in Utah
Scientists have made a rare find: four skulls of a new species of giant plant-eating dinosaur, one of them completely intact.
Skulls of plant-eating dinosaurs were so light and fragile that they have rarely been preserved to be discovered by paleontologists. Reaction to the find, made in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah, was “probably not printable in a newspaper,” said Dan Chure, a paleontologist with the monument.
“Everyone was really dumbfounded,” Chure said. “You can go your entire career without seeing one of these. . . . To find multiple heads was just phenomenal.”
Abydosaurus, which lived about 100 million years ago, is a type of sauropod, the largest kind of dinosaur to walk on land. Like its relative Brachiosaurus, the long-necked Abydosaurus had a massive body with tree-trunk legs but a relatively tiny head, about one-two-hundredth the size of its body mass. The smallest sauropods could weigh as little as 10 tons; the largest as much as 50 or 60 tons.
The skulls that were discovered were those of juvenile dinosaurs, which were probably about 25 feet long when they died, Chure said.
The dearth of skulls among dinosaur fossils has posed a hurdle in learning about the creatures’ biology and evolution, researchers said.
After all, “when you meet somebody, you look at their face,” said coauthor Jeff Wilson, assistant curator at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology. “There’s a lot of information which has to do with their face -- organs, eyes, nose, ears, intricate parts of the brain.”
Thus the discovery of heads, published Wednesday in the journal Naturwissenschaften, has provided a potential treasure trove of information for scientists. They can even perform a CT scan of the intact head to map the shape of the brain.
The heads also contained rows of key data -- teeth. Studying the teeth might provide information on the animals’ diet and digestive systems, the authors wrote.
Wilson said that sauropods like Abydosaurus did not break down food at all in their mouths, instead vacuuming plants straight to their stomachs. This efficient system, he said, might help explain why sauropods could grow from a football-sized egg to 50 feet in length.
Matthew Carrano, dinosaur curator at the National Museum of Natural History, said the report laid the groundwork for answering future questions about the evolution of sauropods.
“There’s work for several generations of dinosaur paleontologists to come,” he said.
