EGU Blogs

Palaeontology

A double-whammy of dinosaur awesomeness. Pun totally intended.

November 13, 2013

This is a post about pachycephalosaurs. It’s not a post about feathered dinosaurs, huge dinosaurs, or any of the ones which you may be more familiar with from popular media. Pachycephalosaurs were the dome-headed little scrappers of the Cretaceous, around 85 to 66 million years ago. Their name means ‘thick-skulled lizard’ (pachy: thick, cephalon: skull, saurus: lizard), and they were a small group within the larger herbivorous group of dinosaurs called ornithischians.

It’s probably fair to say that these dinosaurs are one of the least popular groups; they didn’t have razor sharp teeth and sickle-switchblade claws, they didn’t grow to the size of houses, and they didn’t have rows of armoured shields and spikes along their backs. What they did have, however, is an unusual behaviour that signifies them as unique, and pretty amazing, beasties.

Fig.1 – A pachycephalosaur suffering an ‘ouchie’, or cranial lesion (PLoS)

Fig.1 – A pachycephalosaur suffering an ‘ouchie’, or cranial lesion (PLoS)

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SVP Day 3

November 2, 2013

OK, day 3, still alive.

The first session this morning was on saurischians dinosaurs, the major group that includes sauropods and theropods.

My supervisor, Phil Mannion, was the first talk I was awake enough for (*cough*), and gave us a run-through of sauropods from the infamous Late Jurassic (~150 million years old) Tendaguru formation from Tanzania. With new revisions, the sauropod fauna from here are remarkably similar in terms of higher taxa to sites known from Iberia, China, and the US, although only somphospondylans, a quite advanced group, are known from Tendaguru.

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SVP Day 2

November 1, 2013

So again, I missed most of the morning, spending it in the UK Embassy getting an emergency passport. Unfortunately, this means most of the Romer Session, where early-career (thanks Phil for correction) students present for an award, was missed. Obviously, with the lack of Wi-Fi and live-tweeting, the session might as well have been conducted in a black hole.

I managed to catch the last talk though, on the evolutionary relationships (phylogeny) of diplodocoids sauropodomorphs. As these guys are quite an important constituent of Late Jurassic terrestrial ecosystems, figured this would be worth attending, and actually paying attention to.

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SVP Day 1

November 1, 2013

So after definitely not losing my passport, I managed to make it into one of the sessions for the first day at SVP, the Society for Vertebrate Palaeontology’s annual meeting over in Los Angeles.

The session was on the impacts of ontogeny, or growth and development on our understanding of dinosaur relationships and biology.

The only one I managed to catch was on the sauropod dinosaur, Lufengosaurus, where the researcher had taken thin sections through embryonic limb bones to track the change in shape through growth, or allometric variation. The authors were able to show that, due to the variation in the proportion of cavities and bone growth that these dinos grew at extremely fast rates, which is pretty cool, and may explain how these sauropods were able to get so big.

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