An artist’s depiction of a newly described species of pachycephalosaur that was named Platytholus clemensi, after the late UC Berkeley paleontologist William Clemens. The cranium is dome-shaped, however UC Berkeley and Chapman College paleontologists consider it was coated with bristles of keratin (purple) which will have been much more elaborate than depicted right here. The bony knobs and spikes (yellow) are attribute of pachycephalosaurs and plenty of different dinosaurs. (Graphic courtesy of Jack Horner)
When you take a look at sufficient dinosaur fossils, you’ll see that their skulls sport a tremendous number of bony ornaments, starting from the horns of Triceratops and the mohawk-like crests of hadrosaurs to the bumps and knobs protecting the pinnacle of Tyrannosaurus rex.
However paleontologists are more and more discovering proof that dinosaurs had much more elaborate head ornaments not preserved with the fossil skulls — buildings manufactured from keratin, the stuff of fingernails, that had been seemingly used as visible alerts or semaphores to others of their form.
A newly described species of dome-headed dinosaur — a pachycephalosaur courting from round 68 million years in the past — is the newest instance. Pachycephalosaurs lived in the course of the Cretaceous interval, between about 130 and 66 million years in the past, and tended to be small-to-medium-sized plant eaters. Starting from 3 to fifteen ft lengthy, they walked on two legs and had a protracted, stiff tail for steadiness.
The brand new species relies on a partial pachycephalosaur cranium, together with its bowling-ball formed dome, that was unearthed in 2011 within the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, that are layers of Higher Cretaceous rock from which paleontologists have collected dinosaur fossils for many years.
Primarily based on CT scans and microscopic analyses of slices by means of the fossilized dome, paleontologists Mark Goodwin of the College of California, Berkeley, and John “Jack” Horner of Chapman College in Orange, California, concluded that the cranium seemingly had sported bristles of keratin, harking back to a brush reduce.
“We don’t know the precise form of what was protecting the dome, however it had this vertical element that we interpret as coated with keratin,” Goodwin mentioned, noting {that a} bristly, flat-topped protecting “biologically is smart. Animals change or use sure options, notably on the cranium, for a number of capabilities — it might be for show or for social and organic interactions involving visible communication.”
“I’d guess that there was one thing fairly elaborate up there,” mentioned Horner, a lecturer and presidential fellow at Chapman, professor emeritus at Montana State College in Bozeman and emeritus curator on the Museum of the Rockies.
A histological skinny part of the bony domed cranium of the newly described pachycephalosaur. The realm of harm, fracture and partially healed bone on the highest of the dome is proven by the crimson rectangle. (Picture by Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin)
Peculiarly, the cranium had a nasty gouge on the apex that had healed, indicating {that a} critical accident as soon as befell the creature, however that it had survived lengthy sufficient for brand new bone tissue to develop into the gash.
“We see in all probability the primary unequivocal proof of trauma within the head of any pachycephalosaur, the place the bone was really ejected from the dome someway and healed partially in life,” mentioned Goodwin, emeritus assistant director and paleontologist on the UC Museum of Paleontology. “We don’t understand how that was induced. It might be head-butting — we don’t dispute that.”
Goodwin and Horner warning that this head lesion, a few half-inch deep, just isn’t a smoking gun for the storied speculation that these dinosaurs butted heads as a part of their social interactions — the Cretaceous equal of the way in which bighorn rams conflict heads at this time. As an alternative, the harm might have been attributable to something from a falling rock to an opportunity encounter with a tree or one other dinosaur.
“That’s the primary place everyone needs to go — let’s crash them collectively. And, , we simply don’t see any proof of it, histologically,” Horner mentioned, referring to detailed research of the tissues underlying the dome, each on this specimen and in different pachycephalosaur skulls. “One thing hit the highest of this man’s head and broken it, and it was one thing that was extreme. However having a protection mechanism in your head just isn’t a good suggestion, not for anyone. Any options, any accoutrements that we discover on the heads of dinosaurs, I feel, are all show — it’s all about show.”
A CT scan of the dome reveals the well-organized vertical association of the neurovascular community within the cranium and dome of Platytholus clemensi, suggesting that the community fed buildings on high of the dome. (Picture by Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin)
Such ornamentation is frequent within the reptile ancestors of dinosaurs and their chook descendants; they’re used each to draw mates and intimidate rivals. However Horner and Goodwin have lengthy argued that the inner construction of pachycephalosaur skulls just isn’t cushiony sufficient to permit head-butting with out extreme mind harm, and that head-butting is a mammal factor that’s hardly ever seen in reptiles or birds. Particularly, pachycephalosaur skulls lack specializations, equivalent to a pneumatic chamber above the braincase, as present in bighorn sheep, or different options current in mammals that have interaction in violent head-butting conduct.
“I don’t see any motive to show dinosaurs into mammals, fairly than simply making an attempt to determine what they could be doing as bird-like reptiles,” Horner mentioned.
Horner, Goodwin and David Evans of the College of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada printed their description of the brand new pachycephalosaur final month within the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The staff named the brand new species Platytholus clemensi, after the late UC Berkeley paleontologist William Clemens, who collected many fossils — particularly mammalian fossils — in the identical Hell Creek Formation the place the brand new species was discovered.
‘A bowling ball within the fossil document’
In response to Horner and Goodwin, pachycephalosaur skulls are fairly frequent in lots of dinosaur beds, although considerably much less so within the Hell Creek Formation, which dates from the late Cretaceous Interval, a number of million years earlier than the asteroid or comet impression that lowered the curtain on dinosaurs and altered the trajectory of life on Earth. One major motive for the skulls’ ubiquity is the massive bony dome.
Montage of 4 pachycephalosaurs. Clockwise from high left: Stegoceras, Prenocephale, Pachycephalosaurus and Homalocephale. (Courtesy of Wikipedia below the Inventive Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
“With pachycephalosaurs, take into consideration a bowling ball within the fossil document,” Goodwin mentioned. “Their skulls roll round, get buried, and when uncovered on the floor, they’re very strong, to allow them to stand up to a whole lot of weathering and erosion sitting on the market. Greater than as soon as, folks have walked over an space all summer season and found that what they thought was only a rock, as a result of it seems like a glacial cobble, turned out to be a very nice dome.”
Although Goodwin and Horner have unearthed many different fossils from the Hell Creek Formation over the previous 45 to 50 years, together with bones of Triceratops, T. rex and duckbilled hadrosaurs, they’ve a selected curiosity in pachycephalosaurs — each their evolution and their growth from juvenile to grownup. They’ve sliced by means of many skulls to review how they modify over time and to check the idea that the creatures butted heads with each other, or not less than, that the males did.
Their conclusion: There’s no proof, primarily based on bone construction, that the cranium or neck might stand up to a head-to-head collision. The newly described partial cranium, which was not discovered with different components of the skeleton, additionally has a bone construction inconsistent with head-butting.
As a result of the cranium bones didn’t appear like specimens from any of the opposite two kinds of juvenile, sub-adult or grownup pachycephalosaurs that lived within the space across the similar time — Pachycephalosaurus itself, after which these dinosaurs are named, and Sphaerotholus — the paleontologists categorized the animal as a brand new genus and species, Platytholus clemensi.
The cranium did have traits that the paleontologists had seen in different pachycephalosaurs, together with Sphaerotholus: blood vessels within the cranium that ended abruptly on the floor of the dome, indicating that the blood initially fed some tissue that was sitting atop the dome. If that protecting had been a sheath of keratin, the blood vessels would have unfold out and left indentations or grooves alongside the domed floor, as seen, for instance, below the beaks of birds or on the skulls of Triceratops and different ceratopsians or horned dinosaurs. However the vessels had been perpendicular to the floor, as in the event that they fed a vertical construction.
Mark Goodwin and Jack Horner helicoptered into the Hell Creek Formation at Snap Creek, Montana. (Photograph courtesy of Mark Goodwin, 2008)
“What we see are these vertical canals coming to the floor, which means that there could be keratin on high, however it’s oriented vertically,” mentioned Horner. “I feel these pachycephalosaurs had one thing on high of their head that we don’t find out about. I don’t suppose they had been simply domes. I feel there was some elaborate show on high of their head.”
Goodwin famous that the form of the domed heads of pachycephalosaurs modified because the animals matured, changing into extra distinguished and elaborate as they approached maturity. That, too, would counsel they had been used for sexual show and courting, although they could have been used to butt the flanks, versus the heads, of male rivals. He suspects that dinosaurs seemingly distinguished gender by colour, as do most fashionable birds, equivalent to cassowaries, peafowls and toucans, which have shiny integumental colours across the face and head for visible communication.
“It’s cheap to counsel that the protecting over the dome may have been brightly coloured or topic to paint change seasonally,” he mentioned.
The paleontologists are acquiring CT scans and doing thin-section histology of different pachycephalosaur domes to find out whether or not different dome-headed dinosaurs could have displayed elaborate vertical headgear along with the recognized array of bumps, nodes and horns.
“The mix of cranial histology after thin-sectioning the cranium and CT scanning gave us a a lot richer physique of information and kinds a foundation for our speculation that there was a keratinous protecting over the dome,” Goodwin mentioned. “We all know the dome was coated with one thing, and we make a speculation, not less than on this taxon, that it had a vertical structural element, in contrast to Triceratops, T. rex and different dinosaurs, which had laborious pores and skin or keratin carefully protecting the bone.”
Goodwin and Horner named the brand new species after Clemens as a result of each developed shut ties to him over the various summers all three explored Montana in the hunt for Cretaceous fossils, generally working facet by facet within the discipline.
“Invoice Clemens was a vital individual in Mark’s life, however he could have been extra vital in my life as a result of he was the one that, again in 1978, mentioned, ‘You recognize, Jack, there’s this lady in Bynum, Montana, who discovered a big dinosaur, and he or she wants it recognized,’” Horner mentioned. When he and colleague Bob Makela checked out the lady’s rock store, Horner mentioned, she requested about a number of smaller fossils in her store, too, which turned out to be “the primary child dinosaur bones discovered on this planet.”
That discovery offered the primary clear proof that some dinosaurs cared for his or her younger and led Horner to put in writing a number of books about household construction amongst duckbilled dinosaurs, together with Digging Dinosaurs in 1988 and a sequel, Dinosaur Lives: Unearthing an Evolutionary Saga, in 1997. He additionally wrote a number of kids’s books, together with Maia: A Dinosaur Grows Up, in 1995, a few child duckbill of the species Horner named Maiasaura, and the 2023 sequel, Lily and Maia….a Dinosaur Journey.
“I owe a large amount of gratitude to Invoice Clemens for sending me on that little journey,” mentioned Horner.
The work was funded by a Smithsonian Establishment grant to Horner and grants from the Nationwide Science Basis (EAR-1053370) to Goodwin.
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