PaleoRewind 2021 - Year of the Ankylosaur - Part 2

[Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] thanks to youtube shutting down its rewind for good there are no fun memes or spoofs to use to introduce the much better paleo rewind this year so without further ado i'm destin of edge and welcome to paleo rewind 2021 every year hundreds of amazing discoveries are made since my main interest involves the lives of long dead animals i bring together a group of other creators to talk about the most interesting and important of them this is paleo rewind this year i've done something a lot more ambitious than last year doubled the number of participants instead of 12 people covering a month each there are 24 people each month has two creators making a video each of their sections will release in the 12 days leading up to the 1st of january on that day i will release a compilation of everyone's segments here on the edge channel this year those involved include the curious archive for the first half of january and paleoanalysis for the second to be released on the 20th myself and dylan of paleoarchive for february on the 21st henry the paleo guy and omega studios for march on the 22nd the dinosaurs will always be awesome podcast and steven from your dinosaurs are wrong for april on the 23rd spinodude reviews and me again for may on the 24th addisor and keenan taylor for june on the 25th raptor chatter and the through time and clades podcast for july on the 26th dr polaris and past eons productions for august on the 27th prehistorica and spencer of cretaceous cast for september on the 28th then from benji thomas and dino diego for october on the 29th dane pavett and the budget museum for november on the 30th and finally north o2 and biotiverse for december on the 31st hey everyone this is ezekiel o'callaghan with raptor chatter and this year i was fortunate enough to be invited to the paleo rewind for 2021 with the channel edge who organizes a lot of paleo youtubers into essentially splitting the europe into more digestible pieces rather than one massive year in review and with that in mind i actually chose to pick the first part of july as my main focus for what i'm going to discuss and that's because there were some papers that i found really interesting and if you follow the channel the last one will be very on brand for me and with all that said let's get started so the story of this first paper starts with a particle accelerator and if you're not familiar with what a particle accelerator is it's a giant tube many kilometers across in which particles are accelerated and what this does is it releases a lot of different types of radiation and light rays off of these particles including some very very fine scale x-rays that can be used to image fossils and honestly this technology's been around for a while and only now are fossils actually being imaged using it now the cost to use it have gone down and that means researchers were able to put a fossil heterodontosaurus tuck eye into this machine and they were actually able to image some very fine scale ribs that weren't visible when they originally looked at the fossil heterodontosaurus was an ornithischian dinosaur meaning it was related to things like paraceroliphous and triceratops although not directly related so it's very much its own thing although still lets us know what some of the early ornithis skins may have been like and these new ribs which are actually gastralia meaning belly ribs may have actually helped us to understand how these animals would have breathed and this seems a little bit strange to talk about how different animals breathe but different animals do have different methods of it for example frogs use a bucal pump which means they essentially pump air into their mouth and then into their lungs and then back out into their mouth and then back out their nose and you can actually see this when some frogs are just sitting neutrally birds have air sacs which they then expand and then pump that into the lungs and then refill the air sacs and then empty the lungs and then refill the lungs with that air sac so they almost always have air inside their lungs but these heterodontosaurus fossils show that there are some different muscle attachments on these gastralia and that actually puts them very closely in common with us now that's not in evolutionary terms they are still very much dinosaurs and we are still very much not dinosaurs but these gastrelia show that there would have been muscles running up and down these belly ribs of heterodontosaurus meanwhile in humans we have muscles running up and down our ribs which when we take a deep breath we can expand the chest cavity and then let that chest cavity depress and this is probably what heterodontosaurus was doing it was essentially using muscles on these belly ribs to physically expand the chest and part of this is shown by the somewhat strange shape of many of these belly ribs because this would have allowed them to stretch and pivot a little bit in relative position to one another and that would have expanded the chest cavity so that these animals could breathe so it's not identical to the system that humans have but it is pretty similar which is actually interesting because the later skins took an entirely different approach to breathing at least as far as we can tell in fact some of the differences at least physically can be pretty obvious because heterodontosaurus had these gastrelia going all the way down to the pelvis so where the hips are meanwhile it seems like later artificians lost these entirely and that these gastralia were not used in breathing in any way instead it's much more likely that a muscle attached to part of the pelvis and then to the back of the lungs and then contracting that muscle would expand the lungs and let air in and then relaxing it would deflate so the animal could breathe out so this paper is really cool because you're using subatomic particles generated by a massive particle accelerator to x-ray a fossil and understand how dinosaurs would have breathed but also how their breathing evolved through time now our next paper isn't about fossils at all or at least it isn't directly about fossils and that's because it's climate study on the j-hole biota and the j-hope iota is from the yixian and geofutang formations of china and it contains many many feathered dinosaurs but also mammals preserved with fur and some of these dinosaurs include things like microraptor and cetacosaurus but also the large fluffy tyrannosaur eutyranus which was preserved with three different specimens all of which had at least some kind of downy feather on them in general though large animals don't have as much hair and we can see this in places like africa where you have things like the large rhinoceros and elephants which really don't have fur and so the same logic applies to dinosaurs having feathers for warmth although we also have wooly rhinos and wooly mammoths which are related and were living in colder environments so was the j-hole biota colder the answer from this paper seems to be yes now it's important to understand the j-hole biota comes from the early cretaceous when the planet was generally warmer and so what researchers did is they looked at carbonate rocks and carbon it just means it's some sort of ion attached to the polyatomic ion of carbonate so co3 with a negative two charge and there's a lot of things that can attach to this one of the most famous is calcium which makes calcite which is essentially limestone but because of the oxygens present in this polyatomic ion of carbonate you can actually get some good data for what the environment would have been like because oxygen comes in two different kinds of isotopes so essentially at different temperatures you'll have different concentrations of these two isotopes in proportion to one another and by looking at the proportions present in the j-hole biota carbonates they were actually able to see that it was pretty cold there and so that means that the j-hole biota probably lived at very high altitude and these are pretty significant altitudes based on the generally warmer temperatures in the rest of the world but the cold temperatures here the authors estimate that these animals were living between two thousand eight hundred meters in altitude and four thousand one hundred meters in altitude so that's about nine thousand one hundred feet high to about thirteen thousand feet high so these animals may have been living in very very high conditions essentially they could have been in almost tundra-like conditions due to the elevation that was present in this environment this then leads into the temperature estimates that these authors propose with an average temperature of about 6 degrees celsius or about 43 degrees fahrenheit and that's year-round so the yearly temperature including the summer is still only 43 degrees fahrenheit it's pretty chilly where these animals were living and that actually may have been the reason that they evolved feathers in the first place essentially it helps to support the idea that feathers may have evolved simply for warmth and now moving into the permian we're going to be looking at solaris sorovis which if you're familiar with the show primeval by the british broadcasting channel you may actually know that they had a pet one in that show and there's some differences most notably the crest and that's because these authors looked the skull of solar sorovis in more detail and found that the crest that it did have in the show wouldn't have been shaped quite like that and said it would have been much more like a triceratopsian skull where it would have been more flat and along the back rather than a single ridge down the middle this study actually tells us a lot about the larger group that solaris actually belongs to the wiggle to swords all of which seem to have been gliders at least legal thesaurus was and solosorovis was as well as others that show evidence of this so it's very likely they were gliding and this is our first good look at the skull of one of these animals and it shows some odd features for example it may not have had vomer bones at all and vomer bones are just one of the bones of the skull of many different animals another set of bones inside the skull of many animals is the pterygoids and these were actually separated by a gap in solaris orivis these two features together give it a wide gap in its mouth in which you could probably fit larger prey and i say prey specifically because the dentition and the large muscle connections that are caused by this gap in the mouth probably helped it to chew on very hard things such as insect carapaces now there's a chance it could have chewed on seeds or something but based on what we know of its environment it's far more likely that was actually eating a lot of insects because exoskeletons can be really hard and solar sorovis was kind of reptile that seems like it would have eaten those things and when i mentioned those large muscles there were fossa so essentially holes in the back of the skull where the muscles pass through that were incredibly large at least relative to an animal its size so it would have definitely had a very strong bite so it could have been comparable to something like potentially a tokai gecko today which also has large jaw muscles and can definitely give you a pretty nasty bite if it does get a hold of you additionally with the crest they also suggest that it may have been used in some sort of display but also might have some defensive features because it may have been used somewhat like modern horned lizards do today and essentially horned lizards have a lot of spikes along the back of their head that when they're provoked they will tuck their head down and have those spikes point up in order to protect themselves so potentially slurosaurus was doing this so this paper may actually help us to understand what the wiggle to swords were actually doing which is gliding from tree to tree munching on insects and protecting themselves from larger predators of course looking at a lot of other wiggle swords is going to be helpful for this and these authors already mentioned that they are doing that so hopefully in the next year we'll get a lot more information on the wiggled swords as for animals that are entirely newly named this year in the video for early june by attasor there was a mention of the animal philax which is known for the left antare coming from spain and now there's another dinosaur known from a right den terry coming from spain that's also closely related as a hadrosaur oid not a hadrosaur just closely related to the hydrosource i'll get into that here in a moment portisaurus so spanie is the new one that was named in early july and it actually plots very consistently with aranasaurus which comes from africa and bolong which comes from china and this is really interesting because it plots with them incredibly incredibly consistently as in in every single analysis that these authors did it plots with those two other animals this is really really strange because while many authors run many many analyses when they're doing these kinds of tests for where an animal is most likely to be related it almost never shows up that they plot in just one place consistently 100 of the time so it seems very distinctive that this was its own clade in fact it's so consistent that the authors do mention that portosaurus may actually just be a fragmentary specimen of something like aranasaurus or bolong but all these taxa are separated by millions of years so it's not that likely hopefully we'll get some more fossils coming from spain though especially of these hatrosauroids that aren't quite hadrosaurs yet so we can try and understand more about their evolution and also so we can have something to talk about more than just jaw bones another new animal was described though coming from closer to where i live near the petrified forest in arizona and this animal wasn't in the petrified forest it was nearby near the placerius quarry where dozens of placerious specimens have been found placerius being a large synapsid which means it's closely related to mammals than reptiles which was one of the dominant herbivores during this time period however this animal was also a herbivore and since it's the first time we found it doesn't seem to have been as dominant but some of its other features make it very very interesting simtomi prosopis sukurorum is a new species of archosauriform and i say archosaur form because it hasn't been distinctly placed in a single group but it seems like it was much more closely related to crocodile forms than it was to dinosaurs with both of those being included within archosaur forms now all that said it was still very different from any other archosaur form that we know of during this time period because it had a very short face and that doesn't seem that interesting but i mean very very short this actually made it convergent with some later crocodilians during the cretaceous so many many millions of years later such as cymosuchus which is believed to have been herbivorous in fact it also had some altering teeth which while samosoukis didn't have different kinds of teeth some other crocodilians did evolve different kinds of teeth and many of those are believed to have been herbivorous or at least omnivorous so it's very likely that syntomi prosopis was doing something similar either being omnivorous or even entirely herbivorous and there were a few crocodilla forms during this time period which were herbivorous for example the aegis although syntomi prosopis doesn't seem to have quite those same adaptations to be one of those and i say that because simtomi prosopis has kind of a hodgepodge of different features that make it really hard to place some features are more crocodile-like and some are more non-crocodile-like for example there's not depression in the basio-occipital bone which makes it less croc-like however it also has a small crest made by the fused parietal bones which makes it more croc-like what this really means is we need to find more of this animal because it could have a lot of very important implications for the evolution and diversification of the crocodyliforms at least early on and hopefully we will find more of this because again this is a quarry that's been well studied so also finding something as totally unique as this animal is pretty unexpected and really goes to show how if you're looking even in places where fossils have already been found and well documented you still might come up with something new and moving much closer to the present day if i say proboscians you may think of elephants such as the asian or african elephants and you might even think of things like mammoths but you will not think of animals like this and that's because unlike in the fossil record we do not have a lot of diversity in the proboscidens which is essentially elephants and their relatives instead we have the asian elephant and we have the african elephants so really not a very diverse group there meanwhile if you look in the fossil record you have things like the dinothears but also gomphotheres and even the stegomastodons this paper sought to look at the broad history of this entire group and try and put their diversification and extinctions into context so they can hopefully be compared to other groups in the future and they found quite a few different things for example the proboscidens migrated to north america during the maya scene across the bering land bridge and once they were there they actually evolved quite a bit diversifying into the gomphotheres but also the anabella daunteds of course neither of these two groups actually made it into the modern day and many other groups also didn't make it into the modern day so it's not limiting it to just those ones and there were many different events that actually caused this the first seems to be during the late miocene and into the pliocene when the ice ages started and this would have cut back on a lot of the different environments that these animals would have been living in and then caused their extinction from that environmental collapse although some did live into the ice ages the next event came about three million years ago and it's not entirely sure what caused it but there was a major loss in diversity this actually didn't affect africa until about 2.4 million years ago and africa is where the probe acidians got their start so it does make sense that they'd be most adapted for those conditions so whatever changed globally didn't affect africa until later and then there was still some moderate diversity including things like the mammoths of course hunting by humans and the end of the ice ages pretty much led to the extinction of most of the rest of those groups leaving us with the very limited diversity that we have today which is really odd considering just how diverse they used to be i mean there are all these different slightly different forms but today we have very little which is really unfortunate from an evolutionary and biodiversity perspective it would have been really nice if some of those did survive to the modern day one of the reasons it would have been good to have these animals survive until the modern day is so we could actually see what they ate and it's kind of hard to tell what animals ate in the fossil record i mean unless you have direct evidence like the animal that it ate inside its rib cage it's pretty hard to tell other than judging by the shape of teeth and some animals don't really have teeth for example the birds and well some people might say it's not important to know exactly what an animal ate in the case of the birds it is for understanding their evolution because the evolution of flight in the birds may be connected to their diet and so these authors sought to set out essentially a guideline for different bird species or at least fossil bird species to be tested to understand what they most likely ate and they tested many many different metrics to try and understand what these animals ate the first set of metrics has all to do with direct evidence so for example if you find a fossil of an animal and it has something like a lizard in its stomach you know it ate lizards really really good metric very unambiguous however you can also look at things like microair on the teeth if that early bird did have teeth and some of them did some of them didn't essentially when an animal eats something whatever it's eating will scratch the teeth in different ways and by studying those scratches you can actually understand what it was eating so that's the second direct evidence method the final direct evidence method is by essentially looking at either coprolites so fossilized poop or regurgitates so fossilized vomit and if you see things like the bones of a lizard inside the coprolite it probably ate that lizard it's again a very unambiguous metric and well i said the other one was the final hard evidence metric there is another but it's somewhat rare because it has to do with soft tissue preservation so essentially the preservation of the animal's beak and as you can see in this toucan speak with the skull both without the be gone and with the beak on the beak can entirely change the shape of the animal's mouth so if that is preserved you can actually get some direct evidence if that's not preserved it's really hard to get that evidence so that one only exists in rare cases so we're going to move on now to the more implied lines of evidence where there's good reason to believe that it probably would have been a specific subject but it's really hard to tell because there's not that direct evidence and so there's many different features that can try and lead into this for example body size essentially sparrows eat very small things such as insects or even seeds whereas larger birds such as the raptors like a golden eagle for example eats more vertebrate material it is a much more aggressive feeder that's going to feed on other animals you can also do chemical analyses on the denting of teeth of animals if they do have teeth which many birds don't again and that can help you understand what they were eating based on how dense those teeth are additionally you can look at other morphometrics of these animals for example what was the beak shape because even some raptors do start to show some of that pointed beak but also they have large talons which is a really good indicator that they probably catch large prey so that's another one of those morphometrics you can apply to try and understand what an animal was eating and there's some subcategories of these that they break down into greater detail but they don't just leave it there because they actually do test it on a golden eagle and by putting the golden eagle into this matrix they were able to go yeah this works for at least this animal and i imagine it'll be tested on more modern birds even today with the golden eagle test you can actually see where they had to remove all the teeth stuff because it doesn't work because golden eagles don't have any teeth but the talons were seen as morphometrically significant and the mechanics of the jaws so another morphometric measurement shows adaptations for predation because it could bite hard enough to actually try and prey on something else the mass also means it's large enough to capture prey that's large enough to sustain the animal all that together means that this is a very good framework to start applying to other fossils so we can try and understand what the diets of the first birds actually were as opposed to just kind of guessing based on a few isolated ideas we actually have a concrete methodology to try and apply this in the future and that's a very important part of paleontology is essentially setting up these frameworks to test ideas in the future and finally one of the papers that i think might actually be one of the more important ones that's kind of underrepresented is about paleonto ethics and that's a new term that is brought up but it essentially deals with the ethics of paleontology and that's a very important thing because there's been a lot of debate about this recently within the field now a lot of this has to do with things like the burmese amber where there's really really incredible fossils coming from it but also it's basically dug out of slave labor and also widespread human rights violations by the myanmar government so it's really not a great thing to study because you're implicitly supporting those ideologies that said there's still more growing concerns that we should have for example in human evolution there is a growing conflict in the tigray region of ethiopia which is right next to the afar region where many early hominin fossils come from so there's more happening there as well as the repatriation so essentially sending back fossils that are from other countries that are housed elsewhere for example ubi rajara was smuggled out of brazil during the 90s and the laws in brazil specifically state hey don't do this so it was smuggled not just taken out so these are just some examples of why you need to actually start repairing these fossil-based injustices so that the people from these countries can actually start becoming more involved in the research that is occurring on fossils from those countries a good example of these kind of ethics being applied not in paleontology but in geology actually comes from bolivia where the indigenous people of bolivia were given control of lithium mines in that country and this then meant that they were able to raise themselves out of poverty on a much broader scale than previously so by applying this same kind of logic to paleontology by correcting some of these injustices against marginalized groups we can actually have a more cohesive unit within the paleontology community for research where different researchers can actually come from anywhere rather than being isolated to just a few wealthy countries we can actually have a broader system that supports all paleontologists and all people who are interested in the natural sciences in fact the authors go on to define the entire term of paleonto ethics saying that is the branch of geoethics that consists of research and reflection on the values that underpin a correct behavior and practice while collecting handling researching and exhibiting fossils paleonto ethics promotes the analysis of ethical problems and dilemmas that arise in different geological economical and cultural contexts which affect the management conservation and popularization of fossils which is to say that like the last paper set up a framework for studying bird diets this paper is trying to set up the framework with which to discuss some of these ethical issues and they go into certain things such as the cultural implications of some of these true logic formations for some simple examples of the cultural importance of rocks and different geologic features you need to understand that the swiss would not be the swiss without the alps but also the tribes of the colorado plateau such as the navajo would not be the navajo without the colorado plateau rocks so the colorado plateau is a large geologic feature that was uplifted and contains many many fossil bearing units so understanding how these tribes and different peoples actually interacted with the rocks that are around them is very important for understanding how we can actually go forward in the future to help promote geologic awareness and help promote the idea that paleontologists really can come from anywhere it's not limited to just white guys like me so first up is actually the only story we picked describing a new dinosaur or a new species of any sort in fact um i talked about this find in more detail in the 2021 update special for our series uh dinosaurs the second chapter but in brief it is a new genus and species a fossil bird from the eocene of england called archaeodromus anglicus archaeodromus was a member of a group of extinct birds called archaeatrogonids and when they were first described in the 19th century archaeotriganids were considered to be closely related to a group of modern tropical birds called the trogans hence their name however more complete specimens later showed that they're more likely members of a completely different group streisary's which includes night jars potus frog mouths swifts hummingbirds and some of their other close relatives this is one of my favorite groups of birds and their evolution is one of the main subjects of my phd thesis so if you like to hear more about their diversity and evolution you should check out episode 5 of dinosaurs the second chapter which is available on our channel something strange about the fossil record of stressors is that until recently we didn't have good fossil evidence of early members of the night jar lineage we had pretty good paleogene fossils of early potus early frogmouths early swifts and even early hummingbirds but not night jars which is very odd because modern night jars of which i have a modern species pictured here they're quite diverse with nearly 100 species and they're found all over the world but this new bird archaedromus which is known from a partial skeleton including some vertebrae wing bones and parts of the skull it exhibits features that not only support the idea that archaeatrogonids are members of streisarys but also that archaeotronics might belong specifically to the night jar lineage and if this is correct then it turns out that the real stem night jars were with us all along and so the archaeotrigonids can help us fill in this noticeable gap in the avian fossil record and interestingly some archaeatrogonids including apparently undescribed specimens of archaeodromus had these bony spikes on their wrists that they might have used for fighting each other which is not something we see in living members of strysoris excellent so next up we have a paper regarding the radiodance which were one of the largest groups of stem arthropods that first gained a foothold in the seas of the cambrian period if you know general like namula karis or the recently described aegiro castus those were members of this clade a notable feature of these animals were their frontal appendages these large segmented structures that were tipped with rows of spines which were hypothesized to have been like grasping arms allowing the radiodon to grab a passing trilobite or jellyfish and transfer them to their crushing mouth parts as illustrated to the right while this has been a popular image for some time there has never really been any good understanding of just how these frontal appendages moved and worked that's where this paper came in the authors making digital models of the arms of five different radiodance species from the burgess shale site to reconstruct their ranges of motion as was hypothesized from previous studies there was found to be a significant diversity in the ways that different radion species used their frontal appendages some examples include anomalocaris which was found to have quite flexible arms for hunting mostly soft-bodied prey animals like the potentially deuterostome batulicholians the squatter-bodied patoya was found to have a more jaw-like appendages for nipping and handling larger and more hard-bodied animals and then there's camp robraster which was originally hypothesized to have been a sediment scepter but what was actually found to have perhaps been a filter-feeding radio dot as the long spines on their appendages were more suited to that task now one curious aspect of this study was that in all cases radiodance were found to have been quite inefficient feeders compared to true arthropods despite the flexible frontal appendages their use alongside poorly specialized oral cones meant that food could not be easily processed and digested this likely explains why most of the group died out following the cambrian period their niches being replaced by more efficient predatory invertebrates but we do have at least some suspension feeding species that seem to have survived into the devonian period all right and our next story concerns a member of the robust australopithecines paranthropus robustus who has historically been nicknamed the nutcracker man because the initial analyses of their heavy skulls jaws and teeth pointed to a diet of mostly hard foods like nuts and seeds this idea has gradually been worn away through subsequent studies which instead pointed to these homonyms as grazers of grasses and other c4 plants for one thing a close look at the microware on the teeth did not show evidence of hard food consumption and carbon isotope studies pointed closer to plants like grasses than anything else the large teeth and prominent sagittal crest on the skull were there to support the sorts of strong muscles needed to process tough grasses much like that of living gorillas this particular study effectively added yet another nail to the coffin of the nutcracker man moniker here the authors examined tooth shipping patterns on the teeth of paranthropus robustus as well as several other hominins and non-human primates to see whether there was any evidence there regarding potential diets indeed paranthropists showed more similarities with species like chimpanzees and columbus monkeys in that they had far less tooth chipping present than other primates that tended to eat more solid foods like man drills or sake monkeys this is expected if paranthropus robustus was mostly eating grasses and fruits which don't leave chip marks on teeth it seems ever more likely that this species of hominin was not a living nutcracker and we now have multiple lines of evidence to support this it's always good to see corroborating evidence for established ideas and our next story kind of does something similar though for a very different group of animals these are the ever fascinating pterosaurs those mesozoic flying reptiles that were probably closely related to dinosaurs but were not dinosaurs themselves some researchers have long suspected that juvenile pterosaurs were probably capable of flight maybe even as soon as they hatched but a new study tests this idea in detail so the authors looked at juvenile specimens of terra dustro from the early cretaceous of south america and sinopteris from the early cretaceous of china and one of these juvenile sinopteris was actually a specimen formerly considered a distinct genus a nemicholopterus in any case what the authors found was that the size of the wings and juvenile pterosaurs would have allowed them to glide extremely effectively covering much longer distances than modern gliding animals such as flying squirrels can now gliding animals are adapted to cover moderate distances through the air while not spending excessive resources so if juvenile pterosaurs could collide much farther than specialized gliders then this suggests that they were regularly traveling greater distances through the air consistent with being capable of powered flight the authors also found that the strength of the wing bones in juvenile pterosaurs was probably more than enough to sustain stresses necessary for launching into flight and in fact would be hard to explain as serving any other function besides flight if pterosaurs were able to fly as juveniles this probably implies that they were able to take care of themselves from a young age at least when it comes to moving around and feeding because juvenile pterosaurs were often so much smaller than their parents however they may have eaten different foods and lived in different environments from the adults and that's the idea that has been illustrated here by one of the authors of this paper mark witton and if you'd like to read more about the study you can not only check out the original paper which is open access but also a blog post by the lead author derek naish summarizing their findings which we will link in the description below oh sounds good so on to our next story uh one of the great mysteries of paleontology are the ediacaran biota that strange assemblage of maybe or maybe not animals that creeped and rooted in the waters of the last few millions of years of the precambrian one of these organisms the vaguely sea pen shaped charniamosoni is the subject of this next paper they and other specimens like them have been lumped into a taxon called rangiomorpha because they all seem to have shared a branching architecture to their growth however this aspect of their biology has been incompletely known because all paleontologists have had to go on were two dimensional casts and molds of their fossils working with rarely preserved three-dimensional fossils of charnia the authors hoped to dissect their branching body plans and see how their growth actually worked while also trying to answer questions of phylogeny as well charnia's body is divided into multiple branching orders including a lengthened leaf-like first order and a smaller centralized and interconnected second order the authors revealed compartmentalized cavities inside these branches but were unfortunately not able to decipher any meaningful information regarding what types of tissues and organs were present in particular they could not validate or deny a previously published hypothesis that charnia's internal cavities were gastrovascular in nature the 3d analysis also revealed that all the branches of chinese bronze were indeed connected together while the branches themselves seem to have grown as distinct structures through a hierarchical morphogenesis in which subsequent first order branches grew out of second order branches in a rapid sequence and within different phases as is illustrated here on the left by using the observed characters in the 3d fossils the authors were able to plug them into a phylogeny with other living members of early diverging animal groups across the board it was found that charnia was a stem eumeta zoen belonging just outside the larger plate of animals with true tissues neurons and muscles things like nadarians and bilaterally symmetrical forms having evolved after the split with sponges and a little known invertebrate group called placozoans who have been argued to share affinities with some ediacarans on occasion now the authors state that this is the first time an ediacaran has been able to be studied alongside other animals using a quote credible homology-based phylogenetic analysis and this paves the way for future studies into the lives of these strange organisms nice so this next paper used isotopic analyses to bring new details on the life history and reproduction of titanosaurus one of the last members of the solar pod lineage and including some of its largest members see the photo of me under the patago titan at the field museum to the right the titanosaurs are not always known from complete remains but we've at least found many nesting colonies like those of the sites of la rioja province in argentina where the remains used in the study were excavated from late cretaceous rocks after checking the isotopic measurements of the titanosaur eggshells as well as a single tooth alongside neighboring rock from the site determining that the isotopes reflect life histories and not preservation bias the authors could then interpret their findings they were able to calculate the body temperature of a laying titanosaur based on the isotopes in the eggshell and found that these dinosaurs had quite elevated body temperatures comparable to those of living birds you know which is argued heavily in the past the analysis of the preserved titanosaur tooth they also found a general growth occurring within an animal that maintained a constant body temperature so we kind of have some corroboration going on isotopic studies on teeth are also good for understanding what types of food were being consumed and traces were found of c3 plants which is to be expected in a world that was not dominated by grasses and other c4 plants at least not yet and lastly the authors were able to glean some idea about titanosaur nesting habits from the isotopic studies tetanus stores might have relied on hydrothermal activity and egg incubation much like how some of the birds called megapodes of the western pacific islands bury their eggs in mounds of soil and warm their eggs through geothermal energy obviously an animal as large as a dinosaur was not sitting on its nest um it also seems that titanosaurus preferred to lay their eggs during the dry season since it would have been far more dangerous to nest during the wetter seasons where flooding could drown the eggs right that makes sense um our next story is about these clusters of small animal bones from the late cretaceous of montana in the western united states several examples of these bone clusters were found mostly consisting of bones from two types of mammals alphadon which is a close relative of marsupials and phyllicomis which is a member of an extinct group of mammals called the multi-tuberculates and one of these clusters also had part of a lizard skull inside it based on evidence from the composition of the rocks that the bones were preserved in the specific bones that were present in the clusters and the damage to the bones themselves which included etching that might have been caused by digestive acids the authors of the study found it most likely that these represented pellets of indigestible material that had been regurgitated by a predator if so what kind of predator was it well out of potential predators have been found at this fossil site the authors considered a troadanted dinosaur to be the most likely candidate they actually call the troadante from this locality troadon uh though that's controversial for reasons we don't need to go into here but in any case troadanted fossils are indeed very abundant at this site which includes remains of not just their bones but also nesting sites their anatomy also suggests that they were well adapted to prey on small vertebrates and direct evidence of pellet production has been previously reported for similar dinosaurs such as enkiornis from the late jurassic of china therefore these findings could give us a lot of insight into troadanted biology as well as the overall ecosystem that this fossil locality represents wow yeah and last but not least uh here's our final story this is another one that we previously talked about on the 2021 update special for dinosaurs the second chapter but it's very interesting or i think so at least so we'll cover it again here modern birds are basically divided into two major lineages one is the ostrich-like birds which also includes emus kiwi and their kin these are the paleonates or the so-called old jawed birds and the other group is pretty much all other living birds the neonates or new jawed birds and we don't need to go into too much detail about the anatomical distinctions between these two if you want to learn more you can see episodes two and three of dinosaurs the second chapter but uh the basic gist is that two of the bones in the palette of paleonate birds are fused together whereas in neonate birds these bones have a mobile joint between them traditionally it has been assumed that the palette of paleonate birds was more similar to that of the last common ancestor that all birds evolved from which is why they are called the old jawed birds however a newly described skull of ichthyornis from the late cretaceous of kansas in the midwestern united states suggests that this may not be correct now ichthyornis was not a modern bird but it was one of the closest relatives to modern birds that we know of in the fossil record and may in some ways be a good model for what the last common ancestor of all living birds looked like so this new specimen preserves part of the palette and as it turns out what there is suggests that it had a neonate like palette where there was a mobile joint formed by two separate bones and so it may be the neonate palette that is a more ancient condition in the lineage leading to modern birds which would be pretty ironic now a minor thing about this paper that i'll quickly mention here because people have asked me about it this study includes a phylogenetic analysis that incorporates a newly described fossil bird called asteriornis which lived in what is now belgium near the very end of the cretaceous it is one of the oldest convincing fossils of an actual modern type bird and i was part of the research team that described esteriornis in 2020 and in our study we suggested that asteriornis was most likely closely related to the chickens and ducks and similar birds but the analysis in this new paper finds asteriornis as an early paleonate and well what is my opinion about this the short answer is that i'm pretty skeptical the support for this new result is not very strong and the data set used here was focused more on teasing out the relationships among close relatives of modern birds instead of modern birds themselves however the new findings about ichthyornis and what it can tell us about the evolution of the avian palette are extremely cool absolutely and uh that's really it for our stories hello everyone dr polaris here and welcome to my section of the 2021 paleontological rewind i'll be covering a selection of the paleontological discoveries made during the first half of august with past eons taking care of the second half i've highlighted six important papers to discuss that will be covered in a chronological order of publication so without further ado let's get started the first paper i'd like to highlight was that published by arthur brewmetal on the 5th of august and describes a new genus of unenlagine dromeosaur from brazil named ipoupiara which means the one that lives in the water in the tupi language the remains of this animal were uncovered from the maastrichtian aged baoru group of the parana basin the remains of this genus were actually first discovered many decades ago in a period between 1940 and 1960 and consisted of the fragmentary right maxilla and dentary these were initially described as belonging to an indeterminate vertebrate and were found in association with a fish jaw this holotype was stored in the national museum of brazil and would not be discussed again for another 80 years a paper describing this material was scheduled for publication in 2018 with the fossils being photographed in readiness for further analysis however a fire tragically tore through the museum on the 2nd of september that same year destroying the holotype along with innumerable other specimens this caused a significant delay for the paleontologists involved with their paper only being released earlier this year based on the photographs taken of the specimen ipoupiara was assigned to underlay dna a peculiar lineage of dromeosaurs that were endemic to the southern continents in life this theropod would have measured an estimated two to three meters long and probably possessed an elongated narrow snout that was utilized for grabbing small mammals amphibians and a variety of river-dwelling fish in terms of phylogeny ipupiara was placed as the sister genus to austroraptor a better known and larger mass christian anonymous from argentina next we'll shift over to an animal that died out far more recently the famous stella's sea cow this gentle giant the largest cyrenian to ever live was native to the sea surrounding the commander islands which lie in the bering sea between russia and alaska a massive herbivore that fed solely on kelp stella's sea cows belonged to the genus hydrodemalis gigas and grew to a maximum length of 9 meters or 30 feet and weighed in at an impressive 8 to 10 tons as adults this animal was a member of the cyrenian family dugong a day with its only living relative being the much smaller dugong of the indian and pacific oceans a gregarious and social species stellar sea cows lived in small family groups near to the surface as their enormous bodies were naturally buoyant and were incapable of sinking their skin was thick and darkly coloured protecting the species from damage caused by sharpened ice and rocks unfortunately these adaptations left the sea cows both vulnerable and desirable to human hunters and whalers first described in writing in 1741 by german zoologist georg stella the genus was rapidly hunted to extinction for its meat milk and blubber on the 8th of august 2021 a paper by cameron bullon ettel examined the extinction of this impressive cyrenian and suggested how the species helped maintain the health of its kelp forest ecosystems the authors found that the sea cows contributed to increased nutrient cycling in life aided in the dispersal of kelp spores through grazing and contributed to an increased diversity of micro algae in the understory in addition excessive hunting of contemporary sea otters may have also led to the extinction of hydrodamalis with the absence of otters leaving sea urchins to run riot destroying sections of kelp forest on which these animals relied in all this was an important study of the key role played by marine megafauna in maintaining their ecosystems as well as the potential negative impacts caused by their extirpation on the following day august 9th a new genus of australian pterosaur was described in a paper by timothy richards paul stumcat and stephen salisbury since fossils of these flying reptiles are incredibly rare in the land down under the naming of a new species is a significant event indeed this animal was named thapungaka which means spear mouth in the aboriginal guanamara language the remains of which consisted of a partial lower mandible that was on earth from upper albion age deposits of the toolbook formation queensland dated to approximately 104 to 100 million years ago thabungaka represents the largest known australian pterosaur genus so far described with an estimated wingspan of up to seven meters or 23 feet phylogenetic analysis has placed this pterosaur as a member of the family ahanguera day being in particular a part of the sub family tropio nathan a thapungaka was closely related to two other australian members of this subfamily with these being the smaller fera draco and mithunga in life this genus would have been a large piscivore soaring over open waters and seizing fish with its sharp conical teeth in other mesozoic related news the 12th of august saw the description of two new sauropod dinosaurs from the xinjiang region of china named silu titan and hamilton respectively these animals related to the early cretaceous shenzhiko formation dating to approximately 120 million years ago the former genus sulu titan meaning silk road giant was described from a holotype specimen consisting of six cervical vertebrae with intact neural spines a modestly sized sauropod seal of titan sinensis measured approximately 9 meters or 30 feet long and made about as much as a modern asian elephant the photogenetic analysis conducted in the paper placed this animal as a member of the macroneen family you hello piday a group endemic to eastern asia it was found to be the sister genus of the slightly larger eu halopas and would have been a high browsing herbivore in life the second genus described in the paper was hami titan xinjiang encys known from seven caudal vertebrae from the lower tail a non-lithuanian titanosaur that measured approximately 17 meters or 55 feet long and weighing in the region of 35 tons hama titan was most closely related to genera of south american origin including kaiju titan and notto colossus in life both silu titan and hami titan lived alongside indeterminate theropods another unnamed sauropod and the pterosaur hamiterus on the 13th of august a paper by christoph hendricks and philip bell reanalyzing the preserved skin impressions of the abella so carnotaurus was published online this famous carnivorous genus from the late cretaceous of argentina possesses the most extensive skin impressions of any theropod dinosaur and the only example of this form of integument known outside tetonure the skin is preserved in the shoulder thoracic tail and possibly neck regions and consists of medium to large conical feature scales surrounded by a network of low and small non-embicting basement scales separated by narrow interstitial tissue contrary to the conclusions reached in older studies hendrix and bell suggest that the larger feature scales were randomly distributed and did not form neat rows as seen in traditional reconstructions of this animal they also show little difference in morphology along the body while the basement scales vary greatly in size and shape across different regions of the animal the authors suggest that this placement aided carnotaurus individuals in shedding excess heat with the skin playing a vital role in thermoregulation in the life of this large active predator switching our attention away from non-avian dinosaurs and towards the animals that thrived after the kpg extinction event we come to a paper describing three new genera of so-called condylaths from the early paleocene of north america condylaths were a wastebasket group of basal ungulates that has historically included a vast array of families that may not have been closely related to each other one early group of condylars were the periphery kids a family of generalized herbivorous and omnivorous terrestrial animals that first appeared within hundreds of thousands of years after the end of the cretaceous and seem to have been close relatives of the panthedonts a new study published in august by madeleine attberry ettel named three new peripheral species all of which were rather large by the standards of early paleocene mammals baonus honeyeye a cat-sized genus with bulbous molars was named after the shape-shifting bear man beyond from the hobbit unlikely fed mostly on plants supplemented by insects and possibly carrion it would not have resembled modern angulars at all instead appearing more like a raccoon or civet with five-toed feet a long heavy tail and possessing a flexible diet two close relatives konachodon and miniconus dwelt in the same subtropical forested environments of early paleocene southern wyoming these discoveries suggest that we cannot generalize about mammal diversification rates in the aftermath of the kpg extinction event with certain groups achieving larger sizes rather rapidly setting the stage for the later evolution of true hoofed mammals [Music] we are living in the golden age of paleontology with hundreds of discoveries and tens of new species uncovered each year and this year didn't break this troll in this journey we will revisit the highlights of the second half of august 2021 so fasten your seat belts and here we go for this first stop we go 71 million years in the past to meet a very distinctive and iconic dinosaur carnotaurus with more precisely carnotaurus sastrae in august 2021 a paper has been published by christoph hendricks and phil arbel concerning the abolosaurid skin composition in fact there was some speculation about the possible presence of feathers on it however thanks to a detailed description of the theropod's integrity the researchers have found that the feature scales are distributed rather randomly counter to previous interpretations and have multiple forms they also speculate about a thermoregulation role that a skin could have played we are here to meet a member the species of which has been described an exceptionally well preserved specimen and it isn't a dinosaur no it's a pterosaur and not a big one two pin daxus is its name in fact the unveiled specimen is not only complete but also articulated and associated with the remarkable preservation of soft tissues which makes it the most complete tapired fossil thus far it is regarded as an adult which helps classifying it as exactly a tupa navigance due to its vertical suprapremaxillary bony process and rounded periodical crests this crests like for most other pterosaurs serves as a sexual display to attract females these individuals are enjoying the fresh water as much as they can until their next migration they live amongst giant spinosaurus called irritators biscuits dinosaurs these lands should soon find their usual greeniness by the way this specimen has been found during the police raid after an investigation of illegal fossil trade we can't stay here for too long so let's now take our fly to the late credaceous and explore new horizons in a different environment [Music] during this time the oceans were populated with a high diversity of creatures of which giant sea turtles places earth sharks and also mosasaurs we are now going to take a deep dive so be careful and stay alert [Music] researchers at the university of cincinnati identified a new species of mosasaurus the finder a professor and a student have named it mosasaurus everhart room the marine reptile lived in what is today western kansas but back then was the western interior seaway a vast expanse of water splitting north american half during the middle and end of the cretaceous the newly discovered species marks only the second species its genes actinosaurus at first the fossilized joel has been suspected of belonging to a platycarpus but a mix of intuition and further research allowed the professor to find that in fact it was another species a new one on august 23rd a paper has been published regarding the nerf sensors of t-rex's jaw the study concluded that quote-unquote the nerves in the mandible of tyrannosaurus rex is more complexly distributed than those of any other dinosaur studied to date and comparable to those of modern day crocodiles and tactile foraging birds which have extremely keen senses these nervous senses probably served to detect different organs of their prey letting them rather delicately pick specific ones this however is only speculation and its function could have been radically different what's certain however is that our perception of t-rex has not finished to change [Music] to end this journey let's mention a paper published in the canadian journal of earth sciences regarding an anatomical comparison made between two brain cases of daspitosaurus more specifically it is a comparison of daspletosaurus tauruses and a specimen that could have been new distinctive species multiple anatomical differences have been found such as differences in the olfactory tracts but also a longer common character doct and multiple other very specific ones however not only differences have been found in this comparison in fact some characteristics could actually prove the unicity of the two specimens under a single species furthermore we know that such changes could be attributed to a difference in age in conclusion more similar comparisons have to be made to comfort the idea of such an anatomical diversity within the tyrannosaurid family hi i'm prehistorica and today i'm participating in a massive collaborative effort to bring youtube the ultimate paleo rewind for 2021 with dozens of youtubers contributing including your dinosaurs are wrong keenan taylor henry the paleo guy and edge himself each month has been split in two and each half assigned to a different content creator in this segment we will be covering the first half of the month of september be sure to check out the other contributions from other creators and subscribe to edge so you don't miss it when the full compilation is uploaded at the end now what am i gonna cover [Music] there's one thing this video needs [Music] hey [Music] kicking off the month we have a topical new discovery from the cambrian of utah while the cambrina is most famous for the fauna of the burgess shale lagerstarden from the time exist all around the world with multiple localities specifically in the american state of utah the margin formation of western utah nestled into the house range mountains preserves a fauna from the laurentian sea near the burgess shale dating back to roughly the same time 506 million years ago give or take a few million the sea was relatively shallow the fauna was composed of many animals also common to the british shale including an indeterminate species of herdia sweet feeding herded uh osha disjuncta an ontario nosed acorn worm that lived in finely built collagen tubes earlier this year in january they also described the new genus of herded bucaspinia cooperai which was previously only identified as a new species of herded with an enormous mouth on september 6th we got a new genus of paleoscallicut worm the first known from the formation called arachiskolek sayce named after the armored sandworms of frank herbert's novel dune which lived on planet arrakis as well as after the collector who discovered the fossils of the worm are verasie the worm which sported an armor scleratum of densely packed tiny node-like plates was rare or rarely preserved this is in line with several other cambrian loggerstatin of the laurentian coast and perhaps demonstrates that different tafenomic controls affected the preservation of paleoscallicut worms during the cambrian published on the same day as iraqi skull x i would be remiss not to mention the detailed analysis of face biting in tyrannosaurus a common component of intra-specific combat among some archosaurs this study looked at 202 different tyrannosaurus specimens and discovered a total of 324 different facial biting lesions wounds left behind when two tyrannosaurus gave each other what some might consider to be the world's meanest bloodiest kiss they found that the scars were frequently found in the same places on the skull suggesting that biting was almost ritualistic like the rutting of deer only with far more gore the wounds are absent in the youngest specimens and begin to show up as the tyrannosaur entered sexual maturity indicating that this behavior was probably practiced among similarly aged males competing between each other from mates roughly 60 of adults had some kind of facial lesion taken together the life of a hormonal tyrannosaur teen was painted in blood and many took these scars into adulthood among dinosaurs this practice of violent intra-specific combat was largely phased out with the development of feathers which could be used for displays but among archosaurs it still exists in crocodiles and alligators next on our list we head to the cambrian burgess shale for a discovery that i and a few other cambrian nerds had been patiently waiting for since early 2019 [Music] titanocorey's gainzy also known as the mothership is an enormous stout stout-bodied herded and a close relative of camber raster volcatus which was discovered around the same time reaching a length of roughly half a meter long it was one of the largest animals ever discovered in the burgess shale rivaling the almost equally long anomalocaris canadensis while neither its nor anomalocaris canadansis were even close to the largest animals alive during the cambrian the mothership was still one of the burgess shale's largest predators it was a sweet theater like camberaster and herdia using their appendages like fine combs to rake soft-bodied prey like worms or molting trilobites out of the sediment before passing it to the spiny mouth on the bottom of the head the description of camber aster came in 2019 as its fossils easily beat out titanic horizon quantity and quality the description of titanic corey's then was long awaited and helmed by the same two scientists joe moysiak and dr jean-bernard carrall from the royal ontario museum it was known as the mother ship during field excavations just as the smaller camber raster was called the spaceship later it was originally going to be named mega raster in reference to its giant head and as a complement to camber aster the name was changed to titanicorys meaning titan's helmet to better reflect the material the specific epithet genesee is in honor of dr robert gaines who helped during field expeditions at the canadian fossil site and conducted numerous studies to better understand the environment and tafenomic conditions of the burgess shale some of the best material including a large well-preserved head shield and a head shield that served as the holotype covered in agnostics feeding on the remains are now on display at the rom's new gallery dawn of life which opened in december in our next piece of invertebrate news we go back to the cambrian of utah to a different site this time the spence shale discovered by charles walcott of british shale fame in 1908 dates back to roughly the same age as both the burgess and margin localities it is home to a host of cambrian fauna most typical such as indeterminate herdeds a species of an omnicharged and uniquely the only described american lobopodian a cinecricus status a heavily armored kalinsa vermid collins monster with hundreds of spines lining its body in worlds on september 21st a new discovery was published a single fossil of waptia a small shrimp-like arthropod with eggs preserved in three dimensions the fossil was collected by the gunther family and came from a site called miners hollow while initially unexceptional aside from being a 506 million year old soft-bodied arthropod fossil the specimen was recently probed with x-rays using a machine called a synchrotron literally they stuck a 506 million year old bug fossil from utah inside a giant 4th generation particle accelerator in france to look at its eggs using an x-ray 100 billion times more powerful than the ones they use in hospitals one of the eggs actually came loose so they glued it to the end of a toothpick and then stuck it inside of a particle accelerator all of this actually happened anyway the results unsurprisingly are detailed of the roughly 18 eggs preserved in the cluster which would have been tucked under the carapace in life 11 are preserved in three dimensions in various states of decay the mother an indeterminate species of waptia was eight centimeters long the eggs themselves are on average about a millimeter wide details revealed by the particle accelerator include the exact mineral composition of each part of the egg an area possibly corresponding to the yoke a jelly-like membrane around the egg and a part of that membrane that likely attached to the carapace of the mother the inside of the egg was weakly acidic full of phosphorus and other minerals the eggs were at different stages of development at the time of burial leading to the different internal chemical compositions lastly to end off this year's invertebrate special we go to the ordovision of spain here we find a species of average sized trilobite called placaparia cambriensis this trilobite was completely blind and survived by bringing small suspended food particles into a feeding chamber under the head the cephalon protected the appendages close to the head and also help generate a weak vortex to drag in food particles interestingly a team from pagoda colombia and madrid spain looked into the life of placoparia using a technique called fluid dynamic simulation they used a model of placopareo's exoskeleton complemented by trace fossil evidence to investigate exactly how placaparia integrated with its physical environment they found that just like some modern marine arthropods placaparia engaged in a kind of hopping motion or underwater punting as it's called while it was unable to swim it was able to frequently leap up into the water from a substrate by kicking off from its back legs before being dragged back down by the fluid a hop it probably did this to escape predators primarily this kind of hopping motion had previously been hypothesized for monomorph thickness a trace fossil as old as the cambrian suggested to have been made by an arthropod trying to stabilize itself it also explains tiny differences in leg counts in trilobite walking traces dip like 90s differences in speed or water flow over the body of the trilobite affected the number of posterior legs that made contact with the substrate at lower speeds the back legs touched the ground but at higher speeds they were raised off the sediment leading to a variety of conditions for walking traces left by even the same species of trilobite [Music] ah hey guys welcome back to cretaceous cast i hope you enjoyed the last video on september from prehistorica and i'm going to be doing the second part on it today i got a few topics to talk about some pretty cool stuff happens in september so i'm excited to talk about that and then the next video is going to be made by benji thomas and he's doing one on october so without further ado let's get ready oh boy so the first thing we're gonna be talking about is scipionics it was an interesting thing that happened in september guess what it's another dinosaur that's it's gone forever just kidding really uh you know instead instead of going the way of the dodo bird you know it should be going the way of the troll done you know what i'm saying five people so the paper on sypvionics comes from a guy named andrea kaw sorry if i mispronounced that um and it covered two different kinds of theropods that come from italy one of which was sultry of venatinelli and scipionix samniticus and the first bit of the paper goes over sultry vanity a little bit basically just talks about how it's a theropod that came from the early jurassic this critter comes from the saltrio formation which i wonder where it gets his name from sultry eventer it wasn't for that was it because it's a salty ceratosaurus just kidding i'm sorry that's the third joke i've made today that's horrible uh anyway it was an earlier kind of ceratosaur represented one of the it was the beginning of the ceratosaur family and basically the earlier part of the paper discussed how stratosource started out as a tetanuren-like form tetan neurons are basically a large group of theropods so what it means by that is tet neurons are kind of a basic theropod so the paper went over how it started out as a basic kind of theropod and how ceratosaurus eventually became what they are iconically known as you know the big horn and all that the sultry offender was said to kind of represent a form that was more bulky and big than how tyrannosaurus became later on and uh the paper also uh talked about a little bit how ceratosaurus don't really have arms that are that important for hunting and so it's suggested that that happened from earlier ceratosaurs in the family such as sultry eventer not using their arms during hunting as much and so over time that meant that their arms would become reduced so the real meat and potatoes of this paper comes from sipionics and so what the whole thing with sapionics in this paper was is the author was suggesting that scipionics might not be a comp signathen compy it might actually be a juvenile version of a connoisseur particularly the carcaradontosaurus and so the reason he suggested this is because there haven't been any adult versions of scipionics found which is a little weird and this happens with other compies in the family too and so what he did was because of this weird thing he ended up running two phylogenetic tests one which considered compies a family well it didn't really put into consideration the fact that they were young and then another test just kind of looked at them without considering them a family and all the copies in that family ended up really far apart from each other on the phylogenetic tree and so on this phylogenetic tree scipionix ended up where carcara dinosaurs are and the paper pointed out that some compies are actually they're around as big as what juvenile versions of carnosaurs like dinosaurs would be expected to look like and uh the paper pointed out that scipionix in specific had particular traits with its face bones particularly the maxline premaxilla has uh five teeth on the premaxilla and that is quite a bit like how carcario dinosaurs are the other paper i'm gonna be talking about comes from scientific reports and it covers two new kinds of spinosaurus that were found um one of which was called stratosue cops and verodios and the other was rapara venator milnere you know ceratosougov's it's kind of a funny name like it sounds like a hybrid between ceratosaurus tsukamimus triceratops i wonder if jurassic world alive i would never tackle that um but yeah so essentially it was these two spinosaurus lived alongside baryonyx in the early cretaceous the paper goes over the problem that all these different kinds of spinosaurus were living together at the same time by suggesting that they could have basically lived in different niches basically that you know they could have come out during different seasons of the year or they could have just simply lived pretty far away from each other so they could technically live at the same time period so the two new spinosaurs from this paper the bones found from them mainly are facial bones and tail bones and they use those bones to differentiate them from other baryon baryon kings which are the subfamily of spinosauridae that has the dinosaurs like baryonyx and tsukamimus and basically the way they found them to be different is psoriatis hookups and reparaventer are different from each other because of how their occipital condyle is put together that's the bone at the back of the skull hold on one second let me get right here so right here got my velociraptor skull pretty cool and at the very back of the head right here little focus that is the occipital condyle and this is the bone that um showed that reparaveneter and seratosukops are different from each other the occipital condyle these two dinosaurs is also a bit different from baryonyx so that's another way that they can be differentiated from baryonyx and they also have holes in the skull at different spots than baryonyx would as well a cool finding in this paper that it goes over is that it suggests that spinosaurus started out in england and they ended up diverging towards africa and they found this out through paleogeographical reconstructions another cool thing that the paper went over is how there's been um discourse in the paleo community about whether or not the sub-families of spinosaurina and baryon kinnay can be separated from each other and so this paper did some tests and stuff including these new spinosaurs and end up concluding that they still do have that separation between each other however there are some certain factors that still need to be put into play with these computer simulations trying to figure out what goes where in the family tree there are some things for spinosaurus that need to be there need to be more of and these are operational taxonomical units and so currently those are kind of spotty but so far it does still seem like spinosaurus uh have baryon kings and spinosaurines so yeah that's it for me for today i hope you enjoyed scientific progress never stops and paleontology is one of the prime examples of this the new discoveries and scientific breakthroughs that occur in this field every year continue to make headlines around the world and intrigue the public and 2021 has been no different since on this channel we run the weekly seven days of science series you'll probably notice that a lot of the stories here have been featured in the october episodes of the show still the discoveries that were made this month are absolutely incredible and hugely exciting so they're worth repeating from new dinosaur species to omnivorous ground sloths and a new human species this really was an action-packed month for paleontology well we'll start off with an interesting paper that was published at the start of the month namely the discovery of the first definite hippopotamus fossils from the early pleistocene of britain found in a cave in somerset in england the discovery of this fossil indicates that the site dates back to between 1.5 to 1.07 million years ago and represents either one of two things it could be that this hippo was part of an early colonization of northwestern europe by these animals or that indicates there was an even earlier previously unknown northwood hippo migration during a temperate phase of the quaternary definitely an incredible discovery either way something else that occurred this month was the description of a new dinosaur a trio daunted from the upper cretaceous of inner mongolia named papillovinator nemenguensis known from an almost complete skull and parts of the body this dinosaur was notably short-snouted for a troll daunted and was found to be placed as an early diverging branch on a group including all other late cretaceous troodontids papilloveneta also enabled the paleontologists to get a better understanding of trodanted anatomy in general discovering that species of late cretaceous eight trodanted in the gulby basin had tooth and cranial anatomies that differed from each other as well as varying forelimb lengths taken to indicate differences in these animals foraging behaviors as they adapted to a range of feeding methods in this restricted geographical region but that's not the only non-avian dinosaur that was named in october we also saw the description of pendrague milner a late triassic aged coelophysoid theropod from a deposit in southern wales the name of this dinosaur is from the welsh for chief dragon while the species name milnere is named for dr angela milner who co-described baryonyx and was a key researcher of english dinosaurs who sadly passed away earlier this year the spinosaurus raparov veneto milnerai was of course also named after her this year too and it's nice to see so much recognition for all her work pendrige was found on a fisher-filled deposit with the known fossils comprising an articulated pelvic girdle a sacrum dorsal vertebrae and a left femur plus two referred specimens represented by a single vertebrae and a bit of a hip bone there have been some recent suggestions that the animals found in late triassic and early jurassic fisherfield deposits such as this might actually have been affected by insulin dwarfism and so the paper describing the new dinosaur actually tested this idea for pendrive itself looking at body size in early neo-theropods the study found that a reduced body size is unique to pendrive but also the other coelophysids did show a similar reduction meaning that there's some slight but ambiguous evidence supporting the idea that this newly named taxon did indeed experience dwarfism so a great new dinosaur discovery that adds to our understanding of the triassic world and early theropod evolution october was also the month in which a very cool paper was published describing a fossil tardigrade from the maya scene preserved trapped in amber this paper explains how tardigrades or water bears have a long evolutionary history diverging from other pan-arthropods sometime before the cambrian period based on molecular clock analyses and yet their fossil record is incredibly sparse with only two cretaceous fossils having been found this amber discovery the first tardigrade found from the cenozoic is described as a new genus and species paradori ferbius chronocarbius the paper also brings up the hypothesis that the rare fossil record of these animals is due to tardigrades only ever really fossilizing in amber added to the fact that fossil amber deposits are very scarce before the cretaceous an absolutely amazing find nevertheless and very rare hopefully more fossil tardigrades will be found eventually also in october i got cancelled for reporting on a paper about ground sloth diets so i'm really looking forward to talking about this again basically a study was published that performed isotopic analyses of nitrogen of the specific amino acids recovered from bones of darwin's ground sloth myelodon darwiniai discovering evidence to suggest that it was actually an opportunistic omnivore the study then goes on to say that this direct evidence of omnivory in the sloth means that the ecological structure of the prehistoric south american mammalian communities needs a re-evaluation considering the fact that sloths were a huge part of these for many millions of years and that's all i'll say some interesting developments to do with elephant evolution were made this month as well when a new genus and species of mid-eocene-aged proboscardian was described this species named dagbat ethereum tacia comes from a quarian togo and is actually highly significant due to the time in which it was found since a long gap of 13 million years did exist in the african proboscotian fossil record but this new find filled that gap additionally dag-bat ethereum which is known from a lower molar displays many characteristics of an elephanta form with the researchers classifying this animal as a stem elephanta form and therefore pushing back the origin of this lineage 10 million years earlier than we'd previously realized a very significant discovery indeed october was also the month in which the earliest evidence of herding in dinosaurs was announced the research explains how although herding and derived sauropodamorphs the sauropods themselves is well documented evidence of this behavior had not yet been found in triassic and early jurassic non-sauropod sauropodomorphs however in this paper an early jurassic age site and patagonia was described as preserving more than 100 eggs and 80 skeletons of various growth stages of the sauropodomorphomusaurus mostly in a small area and from the same stratigraphic horizon with groups of individuals of similar ages clustering together in some cases the paper therefore interprets all of this as evidence of social cohesion as well as age segregation within a herd plus colonial nesting this is therefore now the oldest record we have of complex social behavior in dinosaurs extending the known range of such behaviors back by around 40 million years and indicating a triassic origin for this sort of thing it was an absolutely amazing discovery to read about a very exciting development for sauropod paleontology and learning about prehistoric behavior we were then also treated to a really fascinating paper on the evolution of tusks the paper explains how tasks which are defined as continuously growing in sizes or canines composed of dentine have convergent evolved multiple times within mammals but not in other animal groups except for a non-mammalian synapsid clade the dicinodons the paper therefore suggests that there must be some kind of feature of mammals and mammal line synapsids that makes tusk development possible and attempts to identify what these features are examining the tusks of 10 different dysanodons and comparing them with true mammals the researchers found that the features needed for tusks to evolve include highly reduced tooth replacement as well as a permanent soft tissue attachment between the teeth and the jaws so since these features are found in crown group mammals this explains why they were able to convergently evolve so many times within this animal group and the stem relatives but not in others it was a very interesting paper to read when it came out and also made me realize that i'd never really thought about the definition of a tusk before finally it wouldn't be a month of paleontology news without a controversial reclassification of hominin species october was also the month in which we greeted a new species of prehistoric human homo borduensis the reasoning for this new taxon being introduced was said to be because the poorly defined species homo heidelbergensis and homo rodesiensis fail to reflect the true diversity of hominins living at this time in the middle pleistocene as such in addition to the introduction of a new species the paper explains that many of the fossils from western europe that are currently assigned to homo heidelbergensis should instead be referred to homonyanda talensis homo bodowensis is therefore named not based on any newly discovered material but as a way to try and clean up the complicated mess of hominin taxonomy with the bodo skull from ethiopia being the holotype specimen and the species having a pan-african distribution that even stretched into the mediterranean however not everyone agrees with this new classification with a prominent paleoanthropologist at the natural history museum in london immediately after the publication arguing that the naming of a new species was not necessary especially as older names that already exist in the literature would take precedence over this newly created name anyway he did state that only european specimens should probably be assigned to homo hada bergensis and ones from africa should be classified as something else though but yes as i said in seven days of science basically in an effort to simplify hominine evolution this paper has just made everything more complicated for everyone but that's just paleoanthropology really well that's certainly not everything that happened in paleontology during the month of october but those are some of the highlights and things i thought were particularly interesting [Music] [Music] before we get into the more paleontological discoveries made this month i want to first talk about a specific controversy that happened in late october of 2021 that i would otherwise not mention at all if it didn't involve our good old friend jack horner ben from benji thomas did a great job covering all of the things from the first half of october but that's not where it ends for paleontology this month the second part of october also had some notable moments in paleontology so without further ado let's continue paleo-rewind with a rather different topic for this series that involves everyone's favorite paleontologist jack horner so in october of 2021 jack horner caught himself in some more controversy for those of you that don't know jack horner is a very prolific no that's not the word what is it it's a very respectable no wait hold up that's not the word either um man i don't know what is it jesus it's at the tip of my tongue infamous that's the word i'm looking for he's a very infamous paleontologist in the community all jokes aside horner is no stranger to controversy as he's had some pretty rough takes on dinosaurs in the past but this recent controversy doesn't have much to do with the dinosaurs themselves but rather his latest project that he decided to use them for this project was an attempt to sell a collection of paleoart to people but not like the cool hand-drawn stuff you'd see in books no jack horner decided to instead create dinosaur nfts that he would then sell for a bunch of money because that's a thing right now that's right for those of you who didn't know jack horner you know the guy who was brought on as a consultant for the first jurassic park movie is trying his hand with nfts now and i think that's pretty funny now when he announced this to his twitter on october 16th of this year you could probably guess what the reactions were people were not too happy about this because for those of you that don't know nfts are a very debated topic right now because i don't want this whole segment to be solely based on what nfts are i'm going to give a brief definition of it and why people don't like it nft stands for non-fungible tokens which are interchangeable units of data on a blockchain which makes it so it can be sold traded and owned on digital markets using cryptocurrency nfts are known to sell for ridiculous amounts of money because these works of digital arts gifts and even videos can sell for literally thousands and sometimes even millions of dollars so why are people mad about this besides the absurd prices well the blockchain that's typically used for nfts is ethereum and they use a lot of energy to run their network so much so that they use just as much if not more energy just to run these networks as a small country uses within a yearly period and as you probably already guessed that increases greenhouse gases making it very bad for the environment and again a paleontologist a man who studies extinct animals is participating in a trend that is bad for the environment kind of ironic which i think is what makes it funny but i do have to say some of his artwork isn't that bad in terms of looks i still wouldn't buy them because i mean look at those prices horner had apparently collaborated with paleo artist fabio pastori which if you don't know him you'll surely know his works as he has a very distinct art style especially when it comes to his works in prehistoric life while i can't say i 100 agree with how he's distributing this art i can't say it's bad by any means i mean don't get me wrong it's definitely quality work just not thousands of dollars and leaving me broken the streets quality work and that's the other thing about nfts that a lot of people seem to have an issue with and that's the fact that you don't even truly own it because the buyer doesn't receive any real copyright privileges and the original creator can still distribute it and make more work like it from what i can gather people who buy this stuff don't buy the actual product but rather they buy the proof that they purchased the product or as some would simply call a receipt you are essentially buying a receipt that says you paid for something man i bet you didn't think you'd be learning about nfts and why people hate them in a paleo rewind video but here we are anyways jack horner has a whole collection of these nfts that he titled jack horner's dinosaurs the origin collection in this collection he portrays the dinosaurs with very unique coloring different behavioral elements and has even made animations for some of them there are several dinosaurs within this collection including myasura pachycephalosaurus troadon and t-rex scavenger the most notable one is definitely this t-rex which has been fitted with a chicken-like comb for some reason honestly still looks pretty cool in my opinion alright that's enough of that i know this isn't what you normally see here on paleo rewind but it's always nice to catch up on our good old friend jack horner and see what he's been up to lately but i know what you guys are here for you're here for the actual paleontology stuff you know the discoveries and news on dinosaur fossils and whatnot so let's get into that along with the jack horner controversy another very notable event happened during this time that involved a rather pressing matter in the world of paleontology and it's one that i've talked about before on my own channel and that is the idea of auctioning off dinosaur fossils on october 21st of this year a triceratops skeleton that's known as big john would sell for around 7.7 million dollars in an auction in paris for those of you that don't know big john is a fossilized triceratops skeleton that was discovered in 2014 by paleontologist walter w stein from the hell creek formation and he was named after the owner of the land in which he was discovered in what makes him a notable specimen is his overall size the skeleton is 9 feet tall and 26 feet long which makes him anywhere from between 5 to 10 percent bigger than any other triceratops specimen that has ever been discovered setting the record for being the largest known triceratop skeleton however this isn't the only record he set as he's also said to be the most expensive triceratops as well as he was eventually sold to an anonymous us collector in late october who purchased him for a total of 6.6 million euros which converts to 7.7 million dollars this obviously brings up a pretty concerning dilemma for paleontologists as some have stated that along with these specimens already being taken away from the hands of those who've dedicated their lives to studying and preserving these discoveries the purchase of something like this at the price it managed to exceed would only continue to expand the market and demand for dinosaur fossils this in turn could lead to people looting dig sites of specimens that could be useful for the world of paleontology that will unfortunately go through a process that will make it so they just end up in the possession of someone with a lot of money what's worse is that this high demand will only increase the dinosaur fossils value and make them even more expensive making it much harder for museums to get their hands on it and in turn researchers and scientists won't be able to properly study or preserve the fossil and these kinds of situations are unfortunately common in a paper written by paleontologist dr roy smith he talks about how baby pterosaurs from much larger species actually outcompeted the adults from smaller species large pterosaurs were very common in the late cretaceous period and those that were classified as larger pterosaurs had a wingspan ranging from 2 meters to over 6 meters in length small to medium pterosaurs were known to reach less than 1 meter to 2 meter wingspans and the much smaller pterosaurs reached to less than 1 meter wingspans initially it was thought that newly evolved birds were overtaking the smaller pterosaurs in the skies but newer studies show that it was actually the babies of larger pterosaurs that were doing that the examples that were studied were the small pterosaurs from the mid cretaceous chemchem group of morocco where a total of over 400 pterosaur specimens have been discovered in that area examining the jaws of some of the specimens both large and small said a lot about both the pterosaurs themselves and their feeding ecology further research of the fossils within this group showed scientists that the feeding ecology of large pterosaurs were more similar to that of crocodiles rather than actual birds in a modern river bank environment like the nile you'd be able to spot several species of birds within the area all different shapes and sizes hunting for prey that's only slightly different from each other but then you take something like crocodiles and it's a completely different story they're less diverse and what they feed on is dependent on their stage of life young crocodiles are known to feed on smaller easier prey such as insects but as they get older they will move on to smaller mammals and fish and finally when they're full grown they will eventually take down a full-on zebra and it's thought that pterosaurs feeding ecology functioned the same way where in each stage of their life they'd focus on a different form of prey that they were capable of taking down and eating once they reached the final boss of that stage they would be able to continue on the game of life and eat different forms of prey until they eventually reached a high enough level to attempt the next boss fight don't be like that guy anyways thank you all for watching my segment here on paleo rewind but now it's time to move on to november which is covered by dane pavett welcome to the early november edition of paleo rewind 2021 we start by winding the clock back to the ordovician extinction event around 445 million years ago this was the first of the so-called big five extinction events and it resulted in 85 of all life on earth being wiped out at the start of november an international team of scientists published an investigation into the causes of this ecological disaster through geochemical testing and computer modelling the study examined the environmental conditions before during and after the extinction their findings suggested that deep ocean environments saw a decline in oxygen saturation while shallow water environments like reefs and coastlines remained well oxygenated one explanation could be a global decline in temperature disrupting ocean currents and preventing oxygen from being circulated into deep water the ocean is a deeply interconnected environment so when one area suffers it often has a knock-on effect elsewhere it's still not 100 clear what caused this global calling event but this discovery is an important piece of the puzzle and opens up a new chapter in figuring out this ancient mystery moving up the timeline to the late triassic of 220 million years ago we have the announcement of a new platyosaurid dinosaur from the frozen cliffs of greenland platyosaurs were an early branch of the sauropod line of the dinosaur family tree which would like to go on to produce giants such as brachiosaurus diplodocus and dreadnautus this new dinosaur was actually first uncovered in 1991 with many other fossils being found in the years that followed they were believed to belong to a species of platyosaurus a dinosaur known from european fossil sites but this year two near-complete skulls underwent rigorous scanning and assessment and a paper published by victor bukhari as a master's thesis no less announced that this was an entirely new creature ec sarnac this is the most northern discovery of a triassic sauropodomorph to date and is also the first instance of an entirely unique dinosaur genus being found in greenland on top of this ec appears to show anatomical similarities to platyosaur fossils found in south america this has greatly expanded the known range of this family and opens new avenues of investigation into their evolution and distribution a little closer to home now a discovery from the isle of wight off the south british coast a former gp turned paleontologist jeremy lockwood had spent years cataloging fossils from the island when the world got shut down during the year of which we do not speak he spent his newly acquired down time piecing together a dinosaur specimen that had been locked away in storage since 1978. long believed to be an iguanodon or mantellosaurus it turned out this fossil had expanded nasal bones which those other dinosaurs don't possess wouldn't you know it was a new species brystonius simmonsai considering how many fossils of this type tend to get lumped into either iguanodon or mantellosaurus brystonius's distinctive snout has implied a far greater diversity in european ornithopods than previously believed as well as some very unflattering headlines hopefully this reclassification means more specimens in deep storage can get the attention they deserve so their full story can be told and finally we come to the ice age with the ongoing debate on the extinction of the woolly mammoth whether it was climate change or human hunting has been a hot button issue for a good long while and a research team led by scientists from denmark and australia hopes to shed some light on it by using fossils and dna samples the project assessed mammoth distribution and genetic diversity to understand where when and how their populations declined widespread climate change caused the mammoth's ideal habitat of dry open tundra to shrink and this certainly caused a great reduction in their numbers but maybe not enough to have totally wiped them out the results of this study suggest that hunting by humans for meat fur and ivory could have accelerated their decline by as much as 4 000 years this in combination with rapid climate change would have been too much for the mammoth population to compete with and they eventually became extinct around 4 000 years ago this whole study asks us to reject the idea that human hunting was a kind of finishing blow to an already dwindling species something which i've been guilty of myself instead consider that independent of one another hunting or climate change might not have taken them down but that they were both integral factors in the mammoth's extinction the destructive human activity on a large scale combined with massive changes in global climate are just too much for natural selection to keep up with but maybe there's a little something to learn from this thank you for your time i hope you've all had fun and learned something and please enjoy the rest of paleo rewind 2021 [Music] fossils of acela camp hailing from cretaceous texas were discovered now for those who are a bit out of the loop you might remember coelacanth's best as living fossils as the tale goes coelacanths are an ancient type of fish who evolved 400 million years ago that were long thought to have died out 66 million years ago at the end of the cretaceous period but were rediscovered floating around the ocean mining their business oblivious to the fact that we all thought they had been taken out along with the dinosaurs of course living fossil is a bit of a misnomer these creatures do evolve over millions of years pretty significantly in fact although it might just not be superficial for instance i wouldn't judge you for confusing a modern coelacanth with the newly discovered prehistoric coelacanth who swam the mesozoic oceans millions of years prior the new species is a member of the genus masonia and it was a bigen reaching approximately 1.5 meters in length although other species of mausomia could reach a terrifying five meters this new species is also special because it is a rare example of a mausonia genus from north america most are from gondwan waters gondwana being the southern continent in mesozoic times this helicanth is also the youngest selecanth fossil from texas coming in at a ripe 98 million years old [Music] look at this pine cone in amber not only was this pine cone lucky enough to get trapped in amber for eternity but it is the first example of a special behavior never before seen in fossilized plants you see most seeds won't germinate or grow until they fall off of their parent plant or leave the parent fruit but sometimes the seeds just can't wait and begin the germination process while still on their parent plant this process is called precocious germination also known as vivipori and usually occurs in various types of fruit but it is incredibly rare in pine guns in fact pinecone precocious germination has only been officially described once by science according to professor poinar who described the piece of amber so the fact that this pinecone seed started sprouting and was trapped in amber for 40 million years to be the first fossil plant to show of evipery is truly an incredible stroke of luck i know what question has been plaguing your mind as of recent what really is the transition from snake to lizard when is something just a normal snake or a really long lizard after all this is a lizard so is this where does the transition begin this query about the origins of snakes and when they break off from lizards has stumped scientists for many years then came tetrapedafus and plectus a small aquatic reptile from 110 million-year-old brazilian rocks after the discovery of tetraped office in 2015 the paleontological world thought they might be getting somewhere as the animal appeared to be a primitive snake that still had vestigial limbs and the creature was dubbed the first snake yet a new study disproves this supposed missing length between snakes and lizards although the animal does possess the characteristic long spaghetti body of serpents other anatomical traits reveals tetrapedophis a type of marine lizard known as a delicasaur unrelated to snake ancestors the main factor that changed these scientists minds was the features of the skull and after further examination of it and the mold around the skull revealed it shared no similarities with snakeheads so with the lee of the tiny tetraped office being thrown away the mystery of the first snake remains even more difficult than it once was little dinosaur bertha sora leopoldine was found in brazil hailing from the early cretaceous bertha sora is a dog-sized agile herbivore or omnivore descended from what else but giant ferocious predators the new species is a member of the enigmatic novusaurid group who are part of the larger theropod group serratusuria who already contain the other interesting group known as a bellasaurus who i've already gone over before swords are some of the least well known of any dinosaur group made up of a vast array of small agile animals whose most unifying trait seems to be the fact that they were trying to be the exact opposite direction that the rest of the ceratosaurs were going the fact some are nimble lanky armed omnivores really seems to fly in the face of the burly and comically small armed traditions of their cousins bertha sora takes this even further by being toothless and instead possessing a beak the other cool thing about bertha sora is the fact it's one of the most complete noah sword skeletons to date and could help us in further understanding these weird dinosaurs missouri is not the first place you think of when fossils pop into your mind missouri probably isn't the first place for basically anything else that pops into your head except for maybe giant metal arches but recently several exciting dinosaur fossils have been excited 110 miles south of st louis digging up the specimens started in 2017 after a juvenile dinosaur was found 10 years ago now multiple individuals of these same dinosaur species hipsa bema missouriensis have been dug up by a team led by university of minnesota paleontologist peter makovicky makkovicki said the animals probably were buried together because of some sort of mass death of a dinosaur herd such as in a flood the species hypsabemma sometimes incorrectly referred to as parasaurus is a hadrosaur known widely in popular culture as duck-billed dinosaurs and could grow 10 meters in length and floated around 3 metric tons in weight dinosaur bones really are rare for missouri so this fruitful dig has been big news over there also the fact the animals died while in a group may reveal more things about herding behavior in dinosaurs moving on to another reptile deceptive origins we have new research on ephegia what type of dinosaur was effigy exactly well the correct answer would be none of the above epigea is a type of reptile that i like to call the almost dinosaurs creatures who are closely related or look very similar to dinosaurs but are technically not for instance effigy is most closely related to crocodilians than it is to any dinosaurs effigy and the rest of the almost dinosaurs also lived in the triassic period as the first actual dinosaur started popping up and would eventually out-compete all of the copycats effigy is also weird because although descended from crocodilians it was an agile herbivore the new research shows these animals had a weak bite force and shearing jaws which would have made it most suitable for browsing on soft plant material as weird as it sounds they were actually many other herbivorous crocodilians during the triassic but most triassic herbivores either dug up tough roots or fed on the tall trees effigies in between her status further illuminates the diversity of triassic life ichthyosaurs the adorable dolphin lizards of the mesozoic oceans pretty much the most family-friendly prehistoric animal behind barney the dinosaur but as always prehistory is more sinister than land before time will have you believe kahidasuka is a new species of large ichthyosaur from the earlier cretaceous described from a one meter long skull what separates it apart from other ichthyosaurs is the size and spacing of the teeth which would have made it a ruthless predator of large prey such as other marine reptiles the name in fact means quote the one that cuts with something sharp in an indigenous language in central colombia where the fossa was found kahidasuka is a mighty predator but also represented one of the last of the ichthyosaurs the animal lived 130 million years ago in the early cretaceous where a shift was occurring in the mesozoic waters and the old ichthyosaurs were soon being replaced by new types of marine fauna ichthyosaurs wouldn't survive much longer into the cretaceous but at least they went out large and ferocious stop the hammering a long long time ago a wise man once said the elasmoetherium did have a horn adding on to its appearance was a truly massive horn which might have grown as large as a man well turns out he was completely wrong along with many other people the ice age rhino relative elasmatherium nicknamed the siberian unicorn has usually been depicted with a striking giant horn on top of its head but recent studies suggest this horn was not really a horn as much as it was a stump after analyzing the skull of elasmetherium scientists came to the conclusion that a thin shell of horn-like substance covered the large dome over the animal's nose the dome itself was made of bone and allowed for extra space in the nasal cavity to increase sense of smell or possibly function as a resonating chamber to enhance noises elasmatherium made i know this small curved horn covering doesn't really compare to the massive stalagmite that used to jut out of its head but i still find it pretty neat the study also suggests elasmotherium possessed a hard growth on its muzzle that alongside strong lips and neck muscles allowed the beast to dig up the underground parts of plants this would give elasmotherium a unique ecological niche not seen in the large herbivores of today so shirts lost this horn but if this new study isn't disproven it will make elasmotherium a very distinctive animal much different than even the rhinoceros is it is distantly related and usually compared to so those are the major paleontological events of late november an amount of these articles aren't new discoveries as much as they are correcting our old view of extinct animals paleontology is a scientific field that is prone to a lot of change it's one of the things that makes writing a youtube video trying to tell correct information on it difficult you never know for how long you'll be correct but that's also the beauty of the field it's still growing day by day just look at how much was discovered in a period of about two weeks i'm glad that this science is always being updated and our knowledge is pushed further every year and i'm glad i got to be a part of reporting that to you this year well it seems you've reached the end of your trip welcome to the final part of paleo rewind 2021 a series of videos put together by edge and other content creators covering some of the year's biggest discoveries in the world of paleontology this year i have the pleasure of presenting to you some of the findings from december 1st all the way up to today i'm really hoping they don't find definitive proof hecks of paddle dragons once run the earth within the hour of this video's publication if you haven't already be sure to check the previous episodes in this series including november's creators the budget museum and dane pavitt a link to their videos in the description additionally a full video with everybody's contributions will be released on edge's channel tomorrow january 1st if this date is in the past for you you can find a link to that video in the description as well if this date is in the distant future please contact your local doctor and scientist to discuss how you may be suffering from a time travel experiment gone wrong and without further ado let's begin [Music] thyrophora are a group of ornithesian dinosaurs that live during the early jurassic period until the end of the cretaceous featuring dinosaurs such as the stegosaurus and ankylosaurus the newest member of this family is stegoros eligasen this dinosaur's near complete skeleton was found in sub-antarctic chile and just like other armored dinosaurs it had a tail weapon while the stegosaurus has a pair of spikes and the ankylosaurus has a tail club ellen gassin had a flat front-like structure with seven pairs of laterally projecting osteoderms encasing the bottom half of the tail the animal itself was relatively small only being about two meters in length and had a body like a stegosaurus it's skull on the other hand closely resembled the armor appearance of an ankylosaur so which is it a stegosaur or an ankylosaur the answer neither after extensive research in the similar species it was found ellen gassin was closest related to the convarasaurus from australia and the antarctopelta from well use your imagination yep that's right it was found in cleveland what the going on caught it only in cleveland's out just kidding it was actually antarctica in fact after ellen gessen's discovery the three were moved into a nucleate altogether known as parankylosoria which are characterized by their small size and stegosaur body and ankylosaur head combination while we can be 100 sure its tail was used as a weapon let's just say you don't want to be on the receiving end from a hit from it [Music] open the door get on the floor our next story has us walking with the dinosaurs pop culture often depicts dinosaurs like the t-rex running after people only for them to catch up and make a tasty primate snack out of them what they didn't tell you is this was not scientifically accurate shocker i know in reality it's believed t-rexes could not even actually run and clocked in at a max speed of 12 miles per hour in fact most dinosaurs did not run at all or at least preferred not to if given the choice while 12 miles per hour is certainly fast enough to get most people if you're using bolt the fastest man in the world with a top speed of 27 miles per hour you shouldn't have any fears of one of these ancient creatures catching up to you until now la rioja spain is famous for its dinosaur footprints many of which have been found here in the past the location's most recent discoveries from sites la torre 6a and la torre 6b however set a new record in the world of paleontology on december 13th two sets of tracks 6a14 and 6b1 were discovered being comprised of 5 and 4 footprints respectively even though we don't have any remains of what actually left these prints we can still learn about a lot from their creators by observing the prints themselves we'll go into appearance in a bit but let's focus on the locomotion of the creature first there are two important things to focus on when considering how the creature moved first is the length of the footprint as this can be used to calculate the animal's hip height which in turn can provide insight into how much force the creature was using to move in the first place and second is the space between the footprints as this determines the stride of the animal iconologists were able to determine the dinosaur's prince or cast an angle suggesting the dinosaur was full on running quite the rarity in the world of paleontology as it is believed dinosaurs often preferred not to run if they could at all of all the recorded footprints at the site 96 come from walking dinosaurs a little under four percent come from jogging dinosaurs and only these two sets come from running dinosaurs what are they running for did someone set off a dino mite little baby scared about a little bit of extinction anyways how fast were these dinosaurs well it's estimated 6b1 ran anywhere from 14.5 miles per hour to 23.04 miles per hour and 6a14s printed at 19.68 to 27.738 miles per hour to put that speed into perspective on the low end this puts it within the top three and then the high end makes it the top dinosaur speed of all time uncontested making it the fastest non-avian dinosaur of all time so speed's great and all but what kind of dinosaur is it well for the sake of time and simplicity let's assume a single species made both sets of footprints the print reveals that the host was a tridactyl was functionally mesozonic meaning the animal's weight is supported by the middle digit had a wider foot versus a longer one and hand present feathers this combination of traits suggest that the maker was certainly a non-avian theropod so looking at what theropod fossils we have found in spain the top candidates are valid ventrix k-9 from the spinosaurus unit concavinator corcovantus from the cartridge into swords and camariosaurus circuite from the saratosaurean theropods while it's impossible to know for certain which of these species created these prints you wouldn't want to look back anyways if you're running for your life [Music] before we begin this segment do me a favor real quick and think of a bird what features of said bird do you think about initially maybe the feather colors maybe it has an interesting beak shape perhaps the song it produces no matter what it may be for 97.8 percent of you i doubt you considered the tongue rightfully so for most species the tongue has really anything notable about it in fact i'm sure some of you didn't even know birds had tongues this is far from the case for brevaro stravis macro hyodus i'm sure that's how you pronounce it recently discovered in the geophetine formation in the landing province china an avian fossil belonging to the cretaceous period depicts a small bird within the enantiothornase clade the fossil itself is incredibly preserved depicting two features of focus an elongated hyoid bone and stunted cranial rose drum otherwise known as a short beak the hyoid bone is a small u-shaped bone that sits just above where the adam's apple would be located for humans this bone's appearance is relatively insignificant however for certain birds it will literally wrap around the skull almost cupping it like a loving mother's embrace macro okay okay okay from now on i'm going to give some of these harder to pronounce names a little bit of a nickname to give myself an easier time so for the time being this one's name i'm going to call gene gene shares this elongated hyoid shape suggesting this is the earliest recorded case of a bird being able to stick its tongue out of its mouth uh now i do realize that was a hell of a claim to make just because it has a funny bone so what evidence do i have to support this claim well first of all because i said so and second because as i mentioned some birds today share this feature those being the woodpeckers the honeycreepers and the hummingbirds and just look at these freaks of nature what's even freakier is how this bone ties into their abnormally long tongues the tongue needs to be stored somewhere and that somewhere happens to be the inside of the bone that's right our wing friends pull the tongue back into their mouth it wraps around the skull and sits just below a pocket where the right nostril would be considering gene has a similar bone we can assume their tongue was similar as well now what purpose could this tongue actually serve a pretty useful one actually just as modern birds do i likely use the tongue for feeding purposes either using it to hunt insects drink nectar from a flower a combination of both or something entirely different we can almost be certain that it evolved this trait for the feeding benefits it provided this suggests the bird may have been a branch between early stem birds and the extant birds with this feature of today [Music] dinosaurs weren't the only paleo discoveries made this month 326 million years ago during the carboniferous period an extraordinarily large millipede known as arthropleura roamed the forests of howick bay in northumberland england i will elect to nickname this specimen as arthur found within a cracked cliffside the fossil was originally discovered back in january of 2018. the true magnitude of this fossil wasn't realized until just a few days ago however several body segments of the animal were well preserved and able to be studied but we're missing a full image of the creature including the head despite this one segment is all we need to get a rough estimate of its total size using the beautiful and trusty principles of worm math we have observed that nearly every species of myriapod are 4.78 times longer than they are wide our third segments were approximately 1.8 feet wide so using this formula we estimate the total length of the animal was a whopping 8.6 feet making it the largest known land invertebrate ever discovered this species has held the title for over a decade now thanks to a pair of fossils discovered in germany though these crawlers only came in at just over five feet in length of the three arthur is clearly the largest by a massive margin and is believed to be an example of gigantism in the species making arthur the uncontested largest individual of the category arthur plural was believed to inhabit wooded coastlines so they likely ate vegetation or smaller invertebrae which is all of them so all in all it seems arthur is really the largest of all millipedes or is he based on the proportion of the body that was fossilized we can only see 20 legs present now of course it has more than 20 lags but using more worm math scientists estimate arthur only had 32 to 64 legs total the suffix milli suggests 1 000 so to be a true millipede we're missing over 90 of the required luggage in fact no myriapod extant or extinct or otherwise has ever had anywhere close to a thousand lags meaning in a literal sense the millipede does not exist never has been and never will marry christmas at least that was the case until earlier this month welcome to a bonus story around the same time arthur's story was published 1 000 miles away in western australia 200 feet underground the discovery of the first ever true millipede was made umilipus persephone is a living species of myriapod that is represented by four individuals all discovered at the same time one of these individuals had thirteen thousand and six legs beating out the previous record holder elect me planipis by nearly 500 while i'd love to continue discussing this animal this is paleo rewind so let's get back to dinosaurs [Music] [Music] while it is widely believed that many modern day birds ancestral roots lies with the dinosaurs who are the ancestors of the dinosaurs for the velociraptor the answer is more dinosaurs meet vecti raptor green eye an ancient species of dromeosaur from over 125 million years ago i will refer to this individual as vector vector was originally discovered in 2004 but most of its remains were left undiscovered and to this day vector is still only represented by a few spinal vertebrae and part of its sacrum it remained in paleontologist mick green's private collection until recently when a joint study by the universities of bath and port's mouth revealed that they belonged to a completely new species they compared the vertebrate to other dromaeosaurs and revealed many similarities allowing them to group the new animal within the family vector is much larger and stronger than the velociraptor believed to be about 10 feet long it was covered in feathers had massive talons on its feet and had serrated teeth using this weapon combo it likely hunted prey using an ambush strategy possibly by climbing trees and pouncing like leopards which it needed to rely on considering how slow it was it wasn't a top predator in the ecosystem but it was fully capable of taking down prey of similar and even slightly larger sizes while on the topic of its ecosystem vector was found in the west x formation and the isle of white new england this is extremely important because even though a large range of dinosaur fossils have been found in the isle of wight never have we found a dromeosaur before previously these dinos were exclusive to other parts of the world such as north america and mongolia so finding not only a dromeosaur but an ancient dromeosaur suggests the family may have originated from this area the study then claims they were able to cross over into other continents while they were all closer together via land bridges and oceanic dispersals this would fit as the isle of wight is believed to be a crossroads between asia and america for other species of dinosaurs during the cretaceous so this idea is far from far-fetched no matter the case we welcome vector to the family nonetheless [Music] imagine you're a late cretaceous baby dinosaur a day away from eating the planet we call earth you spent a long couple of weeks developing within your egg certainly a harrowing process you've managed to get lucky enough to not be eaten by a predator then the worst catastrophe of the air wipes out your entire species in an instant but millions of years later you get a second chance at life as a clickbait article title on the internet this is the case for baby yingliang and oviraptor embryo in ovo discovered in the heiko formation in southern china ying liang was found in a nest alongside their unborn siblings and parents but this little one appears to be in the best condition overall there's been a lot of information about this little guy on the internet so let me clear up something first when paleontologists say yingling appears as if it died yesterday this does not mean dna is still intact so no i'm sorry we're not on the cusp of jurassic park yet however yingliang still does offer some exciting insight late nearly 70 million years ago the ambrine is an extremely well conditioned showcasing a complete skeleton of the animal it lies within an elongated two-lifted egg and appears to be 11 inches long we can see its head lies between its legs and the tucking position which is a poster previously unrecognized in non-avian dinosaurs this is a position that's common in late stage modern bird embryos this suggests that pre-hatched non-avian theropods had similar hatching behaviors to modern birds some birds are born with an egg tooth on their beak which they can use to crack out of their shell the tucking position adds further mobility to allow this cracking behavior to be executed easier for the bird the tucking process takes a few days to occur and based on ying liang's positioning they were equivalent to a bird's position on day 17 of its 21 day cycle which is where the headline comes from all known oviraptor species had a beak so considering the tucking behavior it's likely this animal did this for the exact same reason birds do possibly being the link for this position altogether [Music] and finally we come to the last story cetaceans the largest animal of the oceans being comprised of whales dolphins and other similar mammals they've ruled the seas for all of human history these animals weren't always at the top however before them similar reptilian animals such as extiosaurs filled their fundamental niche as the ocean's top predator even though they were some of the top predators ichthyosaurs only averaged about 5 to 15 feet depending on the species so the beasts never grew to the absolute gigantic proportions seen by modern day whales that is until a few days before christmas recovered from the fossil hill member location in the augusta mountains of nevada a gigantic ichthyosaur was unearthed for the first time this monster was named simbo spandalas jangoram after tom and banda young who created an ichthyosaurus branded beer as such i will be nicknaming this specimen tom initially we only found some of tom's vertebrae but further excavating unearthed the animal's massive 2 meter long skull even more digging found more backbone vertebrae shoulder bones and orphaned bones estimating the creature's full size to be about 17 meters or 56 feet from my american viewers thomas believed to be nearly 242 million years old and may have been the apex predator of its environment during the triassic epic aside from being the largest animal ever discovered from this period its large eyes were likely used to see prey at deep depths and its large conical teeth were likely used to hunt fish and squids a few fun facts about the ectheosaurs in general they're not actually dinosaurs they're classified as marine reptiles which is the same case for other animals such as deplesiosor and mosasaurus you may have noticed aside from size how many similarities tom shares to whales and dolphins since both don't have gills they must return to the surface to breathe which is where they both originated from for cetaceans their ancestor was the pachicetus a quadruped ungulate that looked a lot like a crocodile otter abomination and as for ichthyosaurs while we don't have the exact link marine reptiles also evolved from a land-dwelling counterpart it is important to emphasize that these similarities arise independent from one another however they don't share an ancestor or anything so scientists have used tom's gigantification from earlier ichthyosaurs to explore the evolution of whales and their growth towards their massive size as well tom's growth came relatively early on in their evolution appearing just 2.5 million years after the first ichthyosaur showed up whales on the other hand took much longer to reach their size two things are believed to contribute to this rapid growth one is the permian triassic extinction where 70 of vertebrae went extinct this opened the seas to a large amount of prey with few predators which led directly to the second contribution ammonite squids and similar creatures survive the extinction which happens to be the perfect prey for the ichthyosaur serrated teeth now if we compare these principles to the whale story yeah they fit whales emerged shortly after the cretaceous tertinary extinction and looking at sperm whales the closest living animal to tom in terms of size also happened to have teeth similar to tom which happens to also be perfect for their prey which also happens to be squids as such scientists believe predators with the perfect biological weapon to hunt whatever just survived a mass extinction is what leads to this gigantification phenomenon and that's a wrap on paleo rewind 2021 i hope you enjoyed if you'd like to see the rest of the episodes check out each creator in the description below and if you enjoyed my lovely personality and narration consider subscribing if the interest is there i'll certainly cover more paleo videos in the future remember to check the completed paleo rewind on edge's channel tomorrow and continue to explore the biodiverse [Music] you

Channel: EDGE Science

Views: 37,798

Keywords: nature, paleontology, fossils, paleorewind, ben g thomas, dinosaurs, jurassic park, jurassic world, top ten, stegouros, cymbospondylus, marine reptiles, ankylosaur

Id: 5WeyvitY1lI

Length: 133min 50sec (8030 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 01 2022