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New Skull Of Tube-Crested Dinosaur Reveals Evolution Of Bizarre Crest

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 01 2021, @06:46AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The first new skull discovered in nearly a century from a rare species of the iconic, tube-crested dinosaur Parasaurolophus was announced today in the journal PeerJ. The exquisite preservation of the skull, especially the bizarre tube-shaped nasal passage, finally revealed the structure of the crest after decades of disagreement.

Despite its extreme morphology, details of the specimen show that the crest is formed much like the crests of other, related duckbilled dinosaurs. Joe Sertich, curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the leader of the team who discovered the specimen said, "This specimen is a wonderful example of amazing creatures evolving from a single ancestor."

"Imagine your nose growing up your face, three feet behind your head, then turning around to attach above your eyes. Parasaurolophus breathed through eight feet of pipe before oxygen ever reached its head," said Terry Gates, a paleontologist from North Carolina State University.

[...] "The preservation of this new skull is spectacular, finally revealing in detail the bones that make up the crest of this amazing dinosaur known by nearly every dinosaur-obsessed kid," said Sertich. "This just reinforces the importance of protecting our public lands for scientific discoveries."

"My jaw dropped when I first saw the fossil," said Gates. He continued, "I've been waiting for nearly 20 years to see a specimen of this quality."

"This specimen is truly remarkable in its preservation," said Evans, who has also worked on this iconic dinosaur for almost two decades. "It has answered long-standing questions about how the crest is constructed and about the validity of this particular species. For me, this fossil is very exciting."

Journal Reference:
Terry A. Gates, David C. Evans, Joseph J.W. Sertich. Description and rediagnosis of the crested hadrosaurid (Ornithopoda) dinosaur Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus on the basis of new cranial remains, PeerJ (DOI: 10.7717/peerj.10669)

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @08:57AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @08:57AM (#1107436)

    TFA:

    The preservation of this new skull is spectacular

    What they found: https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/800a/2021/newskulloftu.jpg [b-cdn.net]

    Now, I'm sure it cleaned up real nice, but...

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @10:04AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @10:04AM (#1107440)

      Yes, they scrubbed it with a tube of Crest

      • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday February 01 2021, @10:06AM

        by Subsentient (1111) on Monday February 01 2021, @10:06AM (#1107441) Homepage Journal

        Gotta make it pearly white!

        --
        "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @10:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @10:25AM (#1107443)

    Dinos had, and needed, extremely efficient breathing systems and if it wasn't used as a snorkel or for smell it would have just been in the way. I can imagine them using it as a bugle (more of a tuba really). Visual display just seems unlikely, too much sacrifice of breathing performance, and there are more efficient ways to make a frill.

    How do they even know whether they used it for smell or not? The inside of the air chambers could have been lined with smell receptors.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @05:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @05:29PM (#1107524)

    Always remember this:
    https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaurs/transcript [ted.com]

    First off, scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs. They like to name anything. Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.
    And so every time they found something that looked a little different, they named it something different. And what happened, of course, is we ended up with a whole bunch of different dinosaurs.

    Nobody noticed the gnarly stuff sort of looked alike. But they did look at these three and they said, "These are three different dinosaurs, and Dracorex is probably the most primitive of them. And the other one is more primitive than the other." It's unclear to me how they actually sorted these three of them out. But if you line them up, if you just take those three skulls and just line them up, they line up like this. Dracorex is the littlest one, Stygimoloch is the middle-size one, Pachycephalosaurus is the largest one. And one would think, that should give me a clue.

    So just with these three dinosaurs, as a scientist, we can easily hypothesize that it is just a growth series of the same animal. Which of course means that Stygimoloch and Dracorex are extinct.

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