The Unbroken Thread

A new dinosaur named Brontomerus mcintoshi, or “thunder-thighs” after its enormously powerful thigh muscles, has been discovered in Utah, USA. The new species is described in a paper recently published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica by an international team of scientists from the UK and the US.

A member of the long-necked sauropod group of dinosaurs which includes Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, Brontomerus may have used its powerful thighs as a weapon to kick predators, or to help travel over rough, hilly terrain. Brontomerus lived about 110 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period, and probably had to contend with fierce “raptors” such as Deinonychus and Utahraptor.

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The shape of the bone indicates that the animal would likely have had the largest leg muscles of any dinosaur in the sauropod family. This is reflected in the name Brontomerus, which literally means “thunder-thighs.” The dinosaur’s species name, mcintoshi, was chosen in honor of John “Jack” McIntosh, a retired physicist at Wesleyan University, Conn., and lifelong avocational paleontologist.

I would never have imagined something so large could support itself and maneuver its body well enough to use kicks to defend itself! It sounds like there’s no direct evidence for this, but it is an exciting possibility.

(Source: sciencedaily.com)

At the very least, there is now evidence that hadrosaurs hung on for another 700,000 years after the KT Extinction… quite impressive if you ask me! And if a large-ish plant eater could do it, why not also smaller plant eaters or even meat eater that don’t fossilize as readily?

(Source: sciencedaily.com)

Unearthed in 230-million-year-old rocks in Argentina, in life this bipedal animal would have been as tall as a 7-year-old but as light as a house cat. Paleontologists announced the new dinosaur, dubbed Eodromaeus, or “dawn runner,” in the Jan. 14 Science.

Eodromaeus joins its kin Eoraptor, a similar-sized dinosaur known to have lived in the same time and place. In fact, when researchers first unearthed Eodromaeus they thought the bones belonged to Eoraptor. Yet the two dinosaurs’ superficial resemblance belies a crucial difference: one ate plants while the other ate meat.

“From 20 feet away you’d do a double take — will the animal run from you or take your leg off?” says team member Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. Yet each creature eventually led to a separate branch of dinosaur evolution. “There’s no way to look at them and realize that the ultimate descendants of one results in a tyrannosaur, and the other something like [the plant-eating] Diplodocus,” Sereno says.

If I had to pick a facet of evolution that excites me the most, it would probably be the discovery of the common ancestor of a group or groups of animals. From such a simple form, both enormous and tiny descendants were born in an amount of time beyond human understanding… sometimes I can almost understand why people don’t believe in evolution when the truth is so much more fantastic than fiction.

Scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) used an ecological model based on predator relationships in the Serengeti to determine whether scavenging would have been an effective feeding strategy for T. rex.

Previous attempts to answer the question about T. rex’s hunting behaviour have focused on its morphology. The flaw in this approach is that two species can possess similar physical features and still have very different hunting strategies, such as vultures and eagles.

Lead author Dr Chris Carbone, says “By understanding the ecological forces at work, we have been able to show that scavenging was not a viable option for T. rex as it was out-competed by smaller, more abundant predatory dinosaurs.

“These smaller species would have discovered carcasses more quickly, making the most of ‘first-come-first-served’ opportunities.”

I was firmly in the middle of the hunter/scavenger debate, but now it seems scavenging didn’t make up much of their diet at all! So we can again have the T-rex our parents imagined… only with a few more feathers.