Plateosaurus: YDAW Archive (Re-upload + Corrections)

[Music] foreign [Music] [Music] they were trying to make an Apatosaurus that's in the middle of a fight and it's rearing on a timed limbs so that it can fight which will have plenty of time to talk about Apatosaurus in the future where if it were fighting it would be using its tail not its you know front limbs in its mouth but they've given it these short little front legs and they've given it primitive feet and hands with with five toes each so I'm thinking it's supposed to be a pro sauropod and yes I said the word prosauropod there's a few people that will take issue with this but uh in the context of this episode I mean it to mean any sauropodomorph that is not a true sauropod I think we're supposed to call them platyasoria now but I I'm not really sure where we're standing on the whole cladistics as far as sort of automorphs go so if we can see that it is a prosauropod then we apply the stock dinosaurs Trope and assume that any toy that's that's in existence that you know would come in a box oh dinosaurs from China would be one of the ones discovered between like 1850 and 1920 which means this really could only be three different creatures you've got antisaurus uh which I don't think this is because anjysaurus was Tiny and really lightly built you've got massive spondylus which is one of the ones that Richard Owen described himself so we've known about that one for quite a while uh that was from South Africa and it was about the size of a horse this appears to be more heavy set than that so that leaves platiosaurus which could be the size of a horse but could grow to the size of a rhinoceros because there was a lot of plasticity developmentally with that dinosaur so I'm gonna go with platiosaurus on the grounds that we're going to be talking plenty about you know American dinosaurs or British Empire dinosaurs but platiosaurus was described by Von Meyer and that's Germany and it was found in in South Germany so yeah globalism I guess we'll start with the head the height of the head is is pretty good but platiosaurus would have had really long light skull and it would have been in profile rather boxy like pretty straight out until you get to the the front edge of the ant orbital fenestra the hole in front of the eyes that all archosaurs had except modern crocodiles would shut up uh then the nose was was sort of a tilted down looking dorky thing they have the nostrils facing forward so those should be off to the sides a little and then teeth were probably okay that's sort of a level of detail thing it's not really like these are these are clearly not carnivore teeth at least so I'm going to say okay it would have had a lot of tiny teeth similar to a modern iguana or an extinct Iguanodon uh jaw were probably good as well it's it's got a little bit of the you know aside from the oh it's not the right length uh in proportion to the top jaw it would have had a little bit of an underbite and and there was sort of a downward curve to the lower jaw at least just in the specimens I've seen neck length is not bad uh you at least have it you know going into the back of the head the way that it's supposed to go instead of at a 90 degree angle which you see a lot um sauropodomorph neck posture is another thing that paleontologists keep going back and forth on as far as I know where we're currently standing is when in doubt it held its head high so let's have the I know this is rearing up to pretend that it's in a fight but have the angle between the neck and the back be sharper and give it a little bit of an S curve moving into the back the I don't mention the the shape of the body very often but this one is really good like it's it's got a tall oval cross section you see a lot of dinosaurs reconstructed with a flat oval or a sort of a lizard sloped thing going on but they were vertical creatures and They Carried themselves upright and good job toy maker on that front um I really think it should be parallel to the ground rule of thumb for saurishians back was parallel to the ground Soros kians from the Greek I keep doing that since I said soroskian which means lizard hip let's talk about the hip it did have a lizard-like hip this would have been shortened profile and it wouldn't have had a lot of the spinal processes like what we saw in the uh stegosaurus last episode they've tilted it back though which you see a lot in the toys because they want to make them drag their tails this was really common for the early half of the 20th century with the reconstructions hey let's just take the hip and bend it back so that the tail drags on the on the ground no lift the hip up straighten the legs have the tail off the ground speaking of the tail it's tiny and sort of rat like the it should be bigger at the base and just continue slight S curve to straight out just balancing the creature the center of mass would be over the back legs because it was a biped and it's really they've got it like swirled around and you'd see that kind of flexibility like at the very tip of a diplotto kid's tail like well Diplodocus obviously but also Apatosaurus or what have you when they wanted to whip them around there's a theory that that was for communication not that much flexibility for a pro sauropod tail and I'm aware of the problems that are presented when you try and design a bipedal toy that isn't a human that you need to stand up and it's much easier to make you know a scaly kangaroo so that it can sit on its tail but we're here to talk about how to make it accurate not how to make it uh feasible from an engineering perspective we're going to talk about the limbs and some people have been sort of looking at me funny because I keep saying that it was a pro sauropod and it was a biped uh you see a lot of reconstructions where they're quadrupeds but the most recent stuff that I've seen is they were actually bipeds because the front limbs were not able to pronate which is where they would naturally be like this but in this reconstruction and in a lot of reconstructions that would assume quad quadrupedal Locomotion they would be like this and it couldn't do this it couldn't turn its hands towards its back legs the front arms are really why I wanted to talk about platiosaurus in the first place if you go up to somebody and say dinosaur there are really two images unless they think of a Velociraptor there's really two images that they're going to think of there's either going to be the Brontosaurus with the you know the long neck and tail and just sort of stomping along or it's going to be Tyrannosaurus Rex with its stubby little front arms that are the butt of so many jokes here come the prosauropods that look like somebody just took a small saurabad and stuck giant theropod arms onto it and it's sort of a which way to the gun show sort of situation going on except that they couldn't actually do the associated gesture because they couldn't pronate their arms so to make this accurate let's turn the arms like so and really make them beefier like the shoulders should be broader and the wrists should be wider now as far as the hands go this is one of the few that I've seen with an actual accurate number of fingers but they're all the same size like neither of these hands particularly looks like it could go up to a Lily and sternus and just smack it and cleave its skull open and I realize that there's a theory that platiosaurus's claws were used to manipulate plant matter but that's boring so the first finger which would be the same as your it would be analogous to your thumb is what I should say would be short and have a pretty long Claw on it and then the next two fingers would be long but with slightly smaller Claws and then the last two fingers were not vestigial but were very small uh I'm not sure what they were used for offhand but offhand but they were small and and there gonna avoid making puns like that back legs not bad as far as length and and ratios go but should be straight again to carry the animals so that's you know off the ground not sitting on its tail uh the feet the the middle three toes would be the big ones the the middle three toes sort of looked like I saw a sore about a theropod foot theropods were also sort of skiing but but different lineage um the innermost toe would have been smaller it would be it would have touched the ground but it would have been smaller than the middle three and the outermost toe was just a dew claw it's walking on its heels like a human when it really should be walking on its toes like a dog the term is uh digital gray it's called digital digital grade because it's on its digits instead of plant a grade so you might notice that I haven't mentioned anything about scale that's because in proportion to the arms the hands aren't bad and in proportion to the legs the feet aren't bad it had rather tiny delicate little feet for an animal this size and this was late Triassic so this was kind of the biggest dinosaur that had showed up on the scene that we know of you know size of a rhinoceros was pretty big at the time uh I've I've seen an interesting theory that says because it had such tiny feet and such a large mass that's why we have so many skeletons so many skeletons specifically from the area of Pangea that would later become slavia in Germany they theorized that it was a swamp and that small creatures like juvenile platiosaurus Sora and and you know little theropods could run across the swamp just fine but platysaurus had all of that bulk centered on these two little points and it sunk into the mud and drowned and that would explain why we have so many of those skeletons and so many adult skeletons we have very few if any sub-adult gladiosaurus so the feet are important to paleontology and to humans understanding of our past and that's why they should be accurate I believe that is everything I wanted to say about platiosaurus thank you for watching your dinosaurs are wrong please like comment and subscribe you could even recommend dinosaurs for me to take apart you could even mail me a dinosaur uh we might put our address in the description and you probably won't get your dinosaur back if you do mail it to me though you can even go to the geekgroup.org to find out how you can become a member and donate and we'll see you next time [Music] I was actually able to find the notes that I took Preparatory to this episode so clearly I must have done at least some research but still made some mistakes and had some omissions [Music] I don't know why I was so confrontational about the term Pro sauropod like I I have since come around apparently on the the subject of nomenclature and how we should use names that correspond to actual groups and not paraphaletic groups platysaurus would be a platiosaurid it would be a basal sauropodomorph basal sore Pottermore communicates what you're trying to say a bit better than Pro sauropod did anyway [Music] laughs in 2012 it was proposed that the type species of Plesiosaurus P Angel Hardy was actually known from such fragmentary remains that it wasn't actually diagnostic we can't use those remains to say okay these other remains are clearly the same species or the same genus in this case so in 2019 the iccn adopted that proposal and decided that platysaurus trussingensis is the type now so right off the bat our little lower third is is wrong on the subject of terminology I said I said the word globalism I meant it in like the yay people from different countries cooperating on science sense and not the uh not the sense that it gets used in in my country quite a bit lately [Music] there are plenty of non-crocodile archosaurs that also secondarily lost their and orbital fenestra or finasteride so I don't know why I made that distinction foreign I really should have talked about the teeth more or about its ecology in general but they had these little triangular teeth with denticles on either side which is the shape you would expect if it's shearing plant material nowadays I would feel obligated to mention that we can pose the neck in such a way that the bones are articulating in what's called osteological neutral pose that does not necessarily suggest that that's how the animal was habitually holding its neck generally speaking animals hold their neck erect so they can look around at things and platysaurus was likely no exception I don't know why I specified that it was sariskia that would stand with their backs parallel to the ground that was the norm for practically all dinosaurs outside of like manoraptora forms [Music] I intend to talk at some length about the way we biomechanically model this animal if we ever do a follow-up to platyasaurus but the tail actually had a really significant range of motion on it at least determined by computer modeling interestingly historically bipedalism for platysaurus was actually the norm or maybe I should say tripodilism because initially you had a lot of restorations like these where it's dragging its tail on the ground but it wasn't until the late 70s 80s that you started to see the what to me is the classic platiosaurus which is the quadrupedal stance then workers figured out oh actually their hands can't pronate down to stand on so clearly it was an obligate iPad on the subject of the four limbs they actually could um supinate their hands so that's going like this but it it was like a passive Supai Nation like if they had their arms resting on the ground in certain positions their palms would be Palm up I don't know what purpose that might serve but it is something they seem to have been able to do [Music] portray the hand was bizarre I may have been basing it on Old diagrams of the hand bones which have this fan like layout I I guess what I was trying to do was keep the inward facing orientation while also showing those big claws but while the third and fifth fingers did oppose the first two at least somewhat when the hand is closed the the fingers couldn't twist the way that I showed them in lateral view the ungules are actually quite narrow you wouldn't see the curvature of the claws when you're looking at the top of the hand finger three and especially four could waggle they could move side to side but as far as I know the the fanned out Arrangement that I drew is impossible [Music] the hind limb ratio of plediosaurus the so the difference between the length of the femur the length of the shin the length of the foot the length of the toes actually does suggest a pretty cursorial animal an animal that could run so not as ponderous as it has often been restored [Music] foreign [Music] I said that the fifth toe was a dew claw the bones are just this little nub without much movement it just kind of sits next to the very long fourth foot bone I would not be surprised if this whole toe air quotes was just encased in the foot and even if it had a proper toe I can't imagine it had a claw it's definitely not the Long mobile toe I drew in the original episode also with the flat Graphics that I used you can't see that even though the first toe is shorter than the next three The Claw on it is enormous it's even bigger than the already large second toe claw as I suggested we really need to do a follow-up like a sun episode or something about pleiadiosaurus there is a lot of history we didn't cover this is among the first dinosaurs known and as such there has been a somewhat convoluted taxonomic history with a lot of species initially named and then either sunk into existing species or split off onto their own it is a widely distributed group of dinosaurs that like we had an animal that we thought was platiosaurus from Greenland of all places but that's been split off into its own genus I touched briefly on its paleobiology but there's always more to be said there's been extensive research into this animal and also just a bunch of stuff that I would usually mention nowadays that I didn't like how workers looked at these scleral rings and determined that it was probably caffomerol which is active whenever probably resting during the heat of the day but otherwise like a cow just browsing for food in the middle of the night we mentioned in herrerasaurus there was a 2020 paper that looked at the the metabolism of platiosaurus and what does the first possibly the first truly giant herbivorous dinosaur look like as far as how hot is it burning what kind of integument does it need for such and such climate that it's living in were there restrictions on its range based on that metabolism a lot of interesting stuff that we're not going to get into in detail here but maybe in the future and please remember to like comment and subscribe and we will see you next time we would like to send a special thank you to these individuals who have gone above and beyond to support this show we could not have done it without you thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong

Views: 39,015

Keywords: ydaw, your dinosaurs are wrong, steven bellettini, dinosaur, dino, dinos, dinosaurs, triassic, jurassic, cretaceous, period, cladistics, taphonomy, therapod, therapods, sauropods, sauropod, fossil, fossils, skull, pathology, feet, hands, claws, teeth, jaw, anatomy, paleo, paleontology, climate, environment, science, educational, kid safe, kid friendly, child safe, child friendly, parody, fossil record, tail, hips, anatomically correct, mounted bones, museum mount, paleotube, paleotuber, plateosaurus, prosauropod

Id: nXM_Ib-gFTY

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2023