Imprisoned in rock for at least 200 million years, a fragile skeleton belonging to a small plant-eating dinosaur is finally being analyzed by scientists thanks to the most powerful X-ray machine on the planet, BBC News and the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.
The skeleton belongs to a juvenile member of the species Heterodontosaurus tucki, which died out in the beginning of the Jurassic Period. This kind of dinosaur was once abundant but scientists have primarily had to rely on incomplete fossil sets in order to study it, which has made it difficult to learn much about these creatures.
In 2005, South African paleontologist Billy de Klerk found what is being described as the most complete set of Heterodontosaurus tucki ever discovered near a small town in Grahamstown, South Africa . The team was able to excavate the fossils still encased in rock, but the fragile state of the remains made it impossible to study using a standard CT scanner.
The bones were transported to the European Synchrotron Radiation Source (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, where de Klerk’s team spend five days scanning the dinosaur’s skeleton using high-powered X-rays. The results were “amazing,” Jonah Choiniere from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, said in an interview with the Daily Mail.
Here’s an artist’s impression of what the dinosaur might have looked like. (Credit:ESRF)
Study could provide new insight into plant-eating dinosaurs
Working alongside Dr. Vincent Fernandez of the ESRF, Professor Choiniere scanned the fossils hoping to determine how the species was able to move, eat, and breathe. They also scanned its fist-sized skull and believe they will be able to create a 3D reconstruction of its brain to learn more about its behavior.
“Right away when we open these images we can tell quite a few things about the skull,” he told the Daily Mail. “One of the things is that it’s likely a juvenile: the skull bones aren’t strongly sutured together. We can also tell that we’re really able to reconstruct the skull very, very well. On the first scans we can see the openings in the skull, which are for the balance organs.”
This is the most complete specimen of this dinosaur species ever uncovered. (Credit: ESRF/P.JAYET)
Choiniere also found the dinosaur had extra teeth located in its jaw that could replace those worn down from grinding, confirming a long-held hypothesis. They also marveled at the minute, delicate palate bones of the heterodontosaurus, which despite being no more than a millimeter in size, remained intact, suggesting that the specimen was not damaged when buried underneath the rock.
“There’s still a lot we don’t know about early plant-eating dinosaurs. We need new specimens like this one and new technology like the synchrotron to fill in those gaps,” Professor Choiniere told BBC News. “We can digitally reconstruct the balance organs of the animal and tell how it held its head and how it interacted with its environment,” he told the Daily Mail.
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Image credit: Billy De Kirk
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