MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-03-26 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Dino News for Nerds
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/science/raptor-fossil-dinosaurs.html
Trilobites
Fossils Show Raptors Prowled North America Late in Dinosaurs’ Era
They were smaller than the creatures that savaged “Jurassic Park,” but
may have had superior ability to stalk and take down prey.
An artist’s reconstruction of Dineobellator notohesperus, and other
Cretaceous dinosaurs from the Ojo Alamo Formation in New Mexico.
An artist’s reconstruction of Dineobellator notohesperus, and other
Cretaceous dinosaurs from the Ojo Alamo Formation in New
Mexico.Credit...Sergey Krasovskiy
By Becky Ferreira
March 26, 2020
Updated 1:02 p.m. ET
One day in 2008, a lethal weapon from a bygone era spilled out of a
hillside in New Mexico.
“We knew that it was something interesting right away,” said Steven
Jasinski, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, whose
colleague, Robert Sullivan, first spotted the fossil.
The relic turned out to be the claw of a dromaeosaurid, a dinosaur
popularly known as a raptor after its starring role in “Jurassic Park.”
After more than a decade of field work and research, Dr. Jasinski and
his colleagues have now confirmed that the claw — along with 20 other
fossils — represents a new species that lived some 68 to 70 million
years ago, just a few million years before an asteroid doomed most
dinosaurs.
They named the animal Dineobellator notohesperus, describing it Thursday
in Scientific Reports. This pint-size predator is the third known North
American dromaeosaurid from the dinosaurs’ twilight period, and suggests
that beasts of its stature may have been abundant at that time.
“The new animal Dineobellator confirms that there is a greater diversity
of raptors at the end of the Cretaceous than has been suspected up until
now,” said Philip Currie, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta
in Canada, who was not involved with the study. “It represents our
steady progress in understanding that small dinosaurs may have been more
common than large forms like the contemporary T. rex at the end of the
age of dinosaurs.”
The fossil record is partly biased toward huge animals like T. rex
simply because their sturdy skeletons are more likely to stay intact for
tens of millions of years, resulting in an incomplete understanding of
dinosaur evolution.
“Raptor dinosaurs are among the rarest of finds because their thin, airy
bones don’t often preserve,” said Lindsay Zanno, head of paleontology at
the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, who was not involved in
the study.
Dineobellator was about three feet tall — a few sizes smaller than the
fictional raptors that wreaked havoc in “Jurassic Park.” Judging from
its unique adaptations, this was a particularly gracile and innovative
predator that possessed clawed digits primed for pouncing onto the backs
of larger animals.
“This dinosaur had an enlarged area for muscle attachment to allow for a
much stronger grasping or gripping ability,” Dr. Jasinski said. “A group
of these dinosaurs certainly could have been able to take down very
large prey, better than other members of the group seemingly could.”
The base of Dineobellator’s tail was also unusually dexterous, perhaps
allowing it to dodge and weave with the movements of its prey, similar
to cheetahs on today’s African savanna.
“This dinosaur would have been better than other members of the group
that we are aware of, at pursuing animals in an open area,” Dr. Jasinski
said.
This hunting strategy distinguished Dineobellator from the enormous
tyrannosaurs — cousins of T. rex — with which it shared this Cretaceous
landscape. Where Dineobellator thrived on plains, tyrannosaurs were
probably ambush predators that kept close to forested areas.
A nasty gouge mark on its claw suggests the individual excavated in New
Mexico scrapped with a predator its own size, perhaps a fight with
another Dineobellator over resources or mates.
“The most likely guess is the sexual display process,” Dr. Jasinski
said. Dineobellator possessed quills and feathers, like most known
raptors, and may have performed flamboyant courtship rituals similar to
some contemporary birds. The dinosaur may have sustained its injury
while battling another male over a mate, or even from a female that was
not ready to copulate.
Dr. Zanno said many of the study’s behavioral hypotheses “are
interesting ideas,” but they “have not yet been tested.” Further
examination of the specimen could challenge the researchers’ conclusions
about the raptor’s life.
However it lived, the fossil evidence of Dineobellator’s sophisticated
adaptations suggests that dromaeosaurids were flourishing when the
asteroid hit.
“These dinosaurs were still trying out new evolutionary pathways and
testing out new things to do and diversifying,” Dr. Jasinski said. “We
are finding more and more of them, and then they just completely die out.”
Given their keen predatory skills and sleek frames, it’s no wonder
raptors have captured the public imagination. Dineobellator is yet
another example of the ingenuity that these hunters possessed, even as
they lived in the shadows of much larger carnivores.
--
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