Know Your Ankylosaurs: Everybody's in this Together Edition

So with all of those posts about ankylosaur taxonomy over the last few weeks, what have we learned about the evolution of this group? Over the course of my PhD research, I was able to identify a bunch of new characters that seemed useful for understanding ankylosaur phylogenetic relationships, including characters related to the cranial ornamentation, pelvis, and osteoderms. Although ornamentation and osteoderms can be tricky, they can still yield useful information if you're careful about how you construct the characters.

Here's a sampling of some of the new characters from the supplementary file that goes along with the paper. Long live rainbow ankylosaur skulls.

With all the new information, here's what the results of the analyses gave us (click to embiggen):

From this, we can take away some interesting points:

1. Gondwanan ankylosaurs are probably not ankylosaurids, but they also don't form a single evolutionary group. Whatever "Minmi" is, it's a very basal kind of ankylosaur, possibly outside the split between Ankylosauridae and Nodosauridae. It's a little bit harder to say what's going on with "Antarctopelta" (previously considered an ankylosaurid), and the Argentinian ankylosaur: both came out as relatively derived nodosaurids, but my dataset isn't designed to test the interrelationships of nodosaurids. I wouldn't be surprised if future analyses incorporating more nodosaurids and more nodosaurid-based characters found that these two species were closely related. It would also be interesting to know which lineage of nodosaurids (probably a lineage from North America) dispersed into South America in the Late Cretaceous in order to give us these two ankylosaurs.

2. There are nodosaurids in the early-mid Cretaceous of Asia, but not necessarily the ones that have been proposed previously. Zhongyuansaurus, for example, was first described as a nodosaurid but is instead a junior synonym of the shamosaurine ankylosaurid Gobisaurus. However, a couple of taxa, like Taohelong, Sauroplites, and Dongyangopelta, are recovered as basal nodosaurids. At present, there doesn't seem to be much overlap between Asian nodosaurids and ankylosaurids, which is interesting! Why didn't nodosaurids hang on in Asia once ankylosaurids evolved, when the two groups seem to have coexisted pretty happily in North America later on?

3. The ankylosaurids from the Late Cretaceous of North America represent a dispersal of Asian ankylosaurines sometime during the early-mid Late Cretaceous. The earliest ankylosaurine is probably Crichtonpelta, from China, and North American ankylosaurines are a deeply nested clade within Ankylosaurinae. We propose the new name Ankylosaurini for the North American ankylosaurines (plus Talarurus, for now).

Here, have some frowny-faced rainbow ankylosaurs. Ankylosaurs are very serious dinosaurs.

4. Where do ankylosaurids first evolve? Unfortunately, that question isn't easy to answer right now: down at the base of Ankylosauridae, there's a mix of taxa from North America and Asia. The position of Gastonia as an ankylosaurid tips the scales slightly in favour of a North American origin for the clade, but some analyses recover this taxon as a nodosaurid, so I think we should be a little cautious about this result. One step up the tree, we've got a polytomy of Aletopelta and Cedarpelta (both from North America) and Liaoningosaurus and Chuanqilong (both from China). Does Ankylosauridae originate in North America with something like Cedarpelta, with a subsequent migration and diversification into Asia? Or does this group originate in Asia with something like Liaoningosaurus and Chuanqilong, and Cedarpelta represents an immigration into North America?

5. And finally, what's going on with ankylosaurids in the mid-Cretaceous of North America? Why don't we find any ankylosaurids between Cedarpelta and the later ankylosaurins? Did 'endemic' North American ankylosaurids go extinct during that time? And why does Aletopelta have such a weird basal phylogenetic position despite being from the Campanian? I don't really have answers for some of these questions, although if you come to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Dallas this October I'm going to try addressing some of them. For now, Aletopelta remains the biggest ankylosaurid enigma to me – it really shares very few things in common with the other Campanian ankylosaurids and I doubt it is an ankylosaurin from the Asian immigration into North America – could it represent a distinctive lineage of North American ankylosaurids stemming from things like Gastonia or Cedarpelta, for which we just don't have other representatives at the moment? Or, is it a nodosaurid masquerading as an ankylosaurid because I haven't sampled the right taxa or characters?

Darn you Aletopelta, why must you vex me so?

As usual, I wind up with more questions than answers every time I try to figure something out.

That wraps up the summaries for this paper, but stay tuned for some more cool research coming out in the next few weeks, and some summer fieldwork recaps!

Arbour VM, Currie PJ. In press. Systematics, phylogeny and palaeobiogeography of the ankylosaurid dinosaurs. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

Know Your Ankylosaurs: Mongolian Odds and Ends Edition

I'm back in civilization, so let's get back to ankylosaurs! Ready Set Go!

Gobisaurus, Zhongyuansaurus, and Shamosaurus

Shamosaurus is a really interesting ankylosaurid from the Zuunbayan Formation of Mongolia. Unlike later ankylosaurids, it still has a relatively long snout like you see in basal ankylosaurs and nodosaurids, and it lacks the distinctive tile-like skull ornamentation of ankylosaurs like Euoplocephalus or Saichania, instead just having a granular, pebbly texture on the skull surface. Gobisaurus, from the Ulansuhai Formation of China, is nearly identical in appearance, and only a few features distinguish these two taxa, namely the length of the tooth row relative to skull length and the orientation of the pterygoids. (Indeed, I think you could make an argument for subsuming Gobisaurus into Shamosaurus as Shamosaurus domoculus, but I'm generally reluctant to start making new combinations given that generic separation is pretty arbitrary anyway.)

Shamosaurus and its too-cool-for-school cervical half rings, on display in Moscow.

Gobisaurus and Shamosaurus are sister taxa; the name Shamosaurinae was proposed at one point and there's no reason to discard it at present even though it only contains two taxa. Shamosaurinae is the sister taxon to Ankylosaurinae. I also identified one new character that links Gobisaurus and Shamosaurus together which isn't present in other ankylosaurids: both taxa have a distinctive groove on each premaxilla, the purpose of which is unknown but there you go. There have been some suggestions that Cedarpelta (from North America) is also a shamosaurine ankylosaurid, and while I find the overall morphology of Cedarpelta to be pretty compelling for placing it in a clade with Gobisaurus and Shamosaurus, I didn't recover it with those taxa in my analysis (it came out more basally-positioned). However, I wouldn't be surprised if Cedarpelta winds up in Shamosaurinae at some point in the future as we find more specimens of both it and Gobisaurus and Shamosaurus.

Zhongyuansaurus was originally described as a nodosaurid ankylosaur partly because of its long snout, but it's indistinguishable from Gobisaurus (except for being smashed and flattened). The holotype is also a subadult (or at least not fully skeletally mature), since some of the cranial sutures are still visible towards the back of the skull. There are some interesting things going on with the postcrania of Zhongyuansaurus, but that's a story for a few weeks from now so STAY TUNED NO SPOILERS IF YOU'VE READ MY THESIS.

Tsagantegia

Of all of the more obscure ankylosaurs I looked at during my PhD, Tsagantegia might be my favourite for being the most surprising in person compared to what I had read about it. Tumanova included a line drawing of the specimen in her original description, which has been oft reproduced, but interestingly it doesn't really do justice to the original specimen (despite being a pretty nice drawing). The line drawing shows a long-snouted ankylosaur with amorphous cranial ornamentation, not dissimilar to Shamosaurus, but with a wider premaxillary beak more typical of later ankylosaurs. In person, however, the skull has distinct cranial caputegulae like we see in Euoplocephalus and Ankylosaurus! It's a pretty cool ankylosaur and I think it's probably really important to understanding the dispersal of ankylosaurs from Asia into North America and the diversification of ankylosaurids in the Campanian-Maastrichtian of Asia, but it's really hard to pin down the age of the Bayan Shiree Formation, and we don't have any postcrania for this taxon. I'm sure I'll be revisiting this guy in the future.

Heck yeah Tsagantegia!

Here it is again but in a more different view!

Talarurus

Way back when I originally started this blog in 2010, I had travelled to Korea to spend some time working in the Hwaseong paleo lab preparing Talarurus material and generally studying the ankylosaur material they had collected from the Gobi. Talarurus, like Tsagantegia, is also from the Bayan Shiree Formation but is clearly distinct. The holotype skull has very subtle cranial ornamentation that takes the form of small cones, rather than flat hexagonal tiles like Euoplocephalus, or bulbous pyramids like Saichania. Weirdly, this configuration is also present in the North American taxon Nodocephalosaurus – either this ornamentation style has convergently evolved, or, as I recovered in my analysis, these two taxa are closely related despite being fairly widely separated geographically and temporally. This is another ankylosaur that I'm sure we'll talk about again.

Talarurus butt in Moscow. The skeleton on display is a composite of several individuals from the same locality, and the skull is totally sculpted and a bit out of date.

Here's the holotype skull, with its weird, weird ornamentation.

Saichania

I've talked about Saichania fairly extensively here last year, but there were a few new things added in this most recent paper: Tianzhenosaurus and Shanxia (both from China) are, most likely, junior synonyms of Saichania, making this the most geographically widespread of the Asian ankylosaurids. Tianzhenosaurus has a nearly identical cranial ornamentation pattern when compared to Saichania, and I couldn't identify any differences that were outside of the usual ornamentation pattern variation we see in something like Euoplocephalus. Shanxia is known from the same formation but from a less well preserved skull, but the morphology of the squamosal horn is consistent with that of both Tianzhenosaurus and Saichania and therefore it probably represents the same taxon.

Next up: what's the big picture here, anyway?

Know Your Ankylosaurs: North American Odds and Ends Edition

I've covered many of the North American ankylosaurs in my previous papers and blog posts. In 2013, I argued that what we thought was Euoplocephalus was more likely 4 taxa – Anodontosaurus, Dyoplosaurus, Scolosaurus, and Euoplocephalus proper. Then in 2014 we described a newankylosaurid, Ziapelta, from New Mexico. There are a few other taxa that had previously been proposed to be ankylosaurids, so let's take a look at them here.

Aletopelta, Stegopelta and Glyptodontopelta

Aletopelta is one of the more tantalizingly enigmatic ankylosaurs from North America. It's from a weird place – California – which may have been much further south 75 million years ago compared to its current position. It was also found in marine sediments, and the decaying carcass had formed a little reef, with oysters encrusting the ribs. The only known specimen of Aletopelta is relatively complete, all things considered, with the osteoderms in situ over part of the pelvis, the legs partially articulated, and with various odds and ends like osteoderms and vertebrae. Unfortunately, the ends of the bones are often chewed apart, and some of the material is a bit hard to interpret.

Here's the articulated pelvis and hindlimbs, and some other armour pieces, on display at the San Diego Museum of Natural History.

Regardless, Aletopelta is a very interesting ankylosaur. It has an unusual osteoderm morphology over the pelvis, with small hexagonal osteoderms closely appressed to each other. Ankylosaur pelvic armour seems to come in two major flavours: fused rosettes, like we saw in Dongyangopelta and Taohelong (and perhaps most famously in Polacanthus), and interlocking hexagons, like in Stegopelta, Glyptodontopelta, and Aletopelta. Tracy Ford suggested that ankylosaurs with these hexagonal pelvic shields might represent a clade (dubbed Stegopeltinae) of ankylosaurids. Glyptodontopelta has since typically been interpreted as a nodosaurid, as has Stegopelta, but the most recent interpretation of Aletopelta was that it was an ankylosaurid. In the revised phylogeny in my new paper, we found Stegopelta and Glyptodontopelta as nodosaurids, but Aletopelta as a very basal ankylosaurid. However, although Ford and Kirkland reconstructed Aletopelta with the typical ankylosaurid tail club, I don't think that it possessed one: the preserved distal caudal vertebrae don't show any of the lengthening or other modifications that are characteristic of ankylosaurid handle vertebrae.

An updated restoration of the known elements in Aletopelta - the main differences between this and Ford and Kirkland's reconstruction are the absence of a tail club, and uncertainty over what the head should look like.

Cedarpelta

Cedarpelta is an important taxon for understanding the biogeography and evolution of ankylosaurids, and I wish we had more specimens! I don't have many new comments to add about this taxon, since Ken Carpenter published a great description of the disarticulated skull back in 2001. Cedarpelta has been interpreted as a shamosaurine ankylosaur, as a relative of taxa like Gobisaurus and Shamosaurus (which I'll talk about in the next post) from Asia, and thus may point towards a mid Cretaceous faunal interchange between these two continents. In our revised phylogenetic analysis, we didn't find Cedarpelta as the sister taxon to either Gobisaurus or Shamosaurus, but it does come out as a basal ankylosaurid in their general neighbourhood, and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if future analyses or new taxa show support for it as a shamosaurine ankylosaur after all.

Nodocephalosaurus

Nodocephalosaurus! What a fun ankylosaur. It's really quite unlike the other ankylosaurids from North America, which typically have flat, hexagonal cranial ornamentation. Instead, Nodocephalosaurus has bulbous, conical cranial ornamentation. Bulbous cranial ornamentation is typical of Campanian-Maastrichtian Mongolian ankylosaurs like Saichania and Tarchia, but in those taxa the ornamentation is pyramidal rather than conical. The front end of the snout in Nodocephalosaurus is also unusual, because there's no obvious narial opening and instead the ornamentation has a stepped appearance. Hopefully better specimens with more complete snouts will resolve this weird morphology. I've also reinterpreted the position of the quadratojugal horn compared to Sullivan's original figures – the horn should be rotated forward so that the bottom margin of the orbit is complete.

Nodocephalosaurus holotype skull in dorsal and left lateral views.

Tatankacephalus

I don't have much to say about Tatankacephalus because I didn't look at the original material myself, but the previous phylogenetic analysis by Thompson et al. recovered it as a nodosaurid rather than an ankylosaurid as originally suggested by Parsons and Parsons, and we found the same result. Overall, Tatankacephalus is VERY similar to Sauropelta, so this is perhaps not surprising.

Up next: More odds and ends, but after I return from Utah!


Arbour VM, Currie PJ. In press. Systematics, phylogeny and palaeobiogeography of the ankylosaurid dinosaurs. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

Know Your Ankylosaurs: Gondwana Edition

Last time, I talked about the ankylosaurids of China, and today we're talking about Gondwanan ankylosaurs. Gondwana basically refers to the continents of today's southern hemisphere; when the supercontinent Pangaea broke apart, it split into two large continents – Laurasia in the north, and Gondwana in the south. Gondwana includes South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica, and, somewhat nonintuitively, India (India kind of beelined into Asia from Australia and that's why we have the Himalayas). Almost all of the ankylosaurs we know about are from the Laurasian continents, which means that the few found in Gondwana are phylogenetically and biogeographically interesting: do they represent southern branches of the ankylosaur family tree, or new migrations into Gondwana from Laurasia? Let's take a closer look:

Minmi paravertebra and Minmi sp.

Minmi is the iconic Australian ankylosaur. Most people, when they think of such things, think of the spectacular referred skeleton with agood skull and in situ armour.

The Smithsonian has a cast of the specimen - here's a section of the ribcage, showing some of the osteoderms in their original arrangement.

Sadly, the holotype is extremely fragmentary and has few elements to make a diagnosis with. Originally, one of the most striking features of Minmi paravertebra was the presence of paravertebral elements, thin rod-shaped bones along the dorsal vertebrae. These were originally interpreted as ossified tendons of the dorsal muscles, and although these are cool to see in Minmi, they are not really unique to Minmi or even to ankylosaurs, since ossified tendons are ubiquitous throughout Ornithischia. One unusual aspect of these ossified tendons is that one set has a flattened, expanded front end. These were interpreted as possible ossified aponeuroses (aponeuroses are sheets of connective tissue in between muscles and tendons). This particular aspect of the ossified tendons IS very unusual, because ossified aponeuroses are extremely rare in animals. While I was hunting around for information about ossified aponeuroses, I came across a very odd case study about mouse deer (Tragulus) – the males completely ossify the aponeuroses above their pelvis and back, creating a carapace-like structure! This is super weird and I would love to investigate this further at some point.

WHAT THE WHAT.

Ossified aponeuroses have since been identified in the European nodosaur Hungarosaurus, which poses a bit of a problem for Minmi: since this feature was one of the only diagnostic characters for Minmi, and since it is now found in an animal that is very unlikely to be Minmi given the spatial and temporal distance between the two, Minmi paravertebra is left without diagnostic characters. A sticky situation that will hopefully be resolved in the future by people who have spent time with the original fossil material!

Antarctopelta

Did you know that the first dinosaur discovered in Antarctica was an ankylosaur? Cryolophosaurus might get all the buzz, but Antarctopelta was first to the press. Antarctopelta is a very interesting little ankylosaur, which I had the chance to study during my visit to Argentina back in 2011. The material is fragmentary but tantalizing, with some pieces of the pelvic armour that are reminiscent of ankylosaurs like Stegopelta and Glyptodontopelta from North America. Unfortunately, in the course of my research I noticed that some of the bones attributed to Antarctopelta and used to help diagnose the taxon didn't quite seem like they came from an ankylosaur. The material was found on an ancient beach strandline with some marine fossils mixed in, and it looks like some of the material originally interpreted as ankylosaurian might be better interpreted as belonging to a mosasaur and a plesiosaur. In the end, we weren't left with any diagnostic characters for Antarctopelta and we should consider that a nomen dubium for now, but there's definitely an Antarctic ankylosaur and I hope at some point some better material is recovered so we can determine the best name for this guy.

The Argentinian ankylosaur

Finally, I also had the chance to study the only described ankylosaur from Argentina. This is also a fairly fragmentary specimen, and it came from a channel lag deposit so it's possible that more than one individual is represented. There are osteoderms, some vertebrae, and a femur, and all are very small – about the same size as the juvenile Anodontosaurus (originally described by Coombs as Euoplocephalus) from Alberta. The femur is interesting because it has some very prominent ridges running lengthwise on it, which seem to be intermuscular lines; these are present but very faint on some other ankylosaurs, and I haven't encountered anything like that in other ankylosaurs. There also may be fragments of the cervical half rings preserved as part of this specimen, since there are some unusual curved osteoderms with multiple peaks and keels. These don't bear any resemblance to other half rings I've looked at, and cervical half ring morphology seems to be taxonomically informative for ankylosaurs. Together, the weird intermuscular lines and unusual cervical half ring fragments might be enough to diagnose the Argentinian specimen as a new taxon, although we withheld from doing so at present.

Here's the specimen on display at the Museo Carlos Ameghino in Cipoletti!

There have been reports of some possible ankylosaur material from India and Madagascar, although much of this material is either very fragmentary (a single tooth from Madagascar), or has not been described (material from India). Stay tuned to find out more about how these rare ankylosaurs fit into the big picture of ankylosaur evolution!


Next up: a grab bag of everybody else!


Arbour VM, Currie PJ. In press. Systematics, phylogeny and palaeobiogeography of the ankylosaurid dinosaurs. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

Know Your Ankylosaurs: China Edition

I'm in Utah digging up dinosaurs! But also, one of the last big chunks of my PhD thesis has just been published online at the Journal ofSystematic Palaeontology. They are generously allowing free access to the paper through the end of August, so head on over and grab a copy while it's free! This time, I'm taking all of the knowledge gained from my previous taxonomic revisions, adding in some more taxa, and doing a revised phylogenetic analysis building on previous analyses to see how everyone shakes out and to learn a little bit more about ankylosaurid biogeography. I'll cover some of the taxonomic stuff over the next few posts, and finish off with the big picture of ankylosaurid evolution.

Pinacosaurus!

I've talked previously about the ankylosaurs of Mongolia, but I've also had the opportunity to study some of their friends from across the border in China. In particular, I got to see lots of specimens of Pinacosaurus, both from the Alag Teeg bonebed in Mongolia, and from Bayan Mandahu in China. Because Pinacosaurus specimens are relatively abundant and usually well preserved, there has already been lots of descriptive work on this taxon, including on the skull (and here, and here), hands and feet, and general postcrania. 

Baby Pinacosaurus are so teeny tiny! This one is from Bayan Mandahu and was collected during the Canada-China Dinosaur Project back in the 1980s.

I've discussed just a few new points about Pinacosaurus, especially about how we tell the two species of Pinacosaurus apart. Pinacosaurus grangeri is known from lots of specimens, almost all of which are juveniles; it has relatively short horns at the back of its skull, a constriction in the snout between its nose and its eyes, and a notch in the rough ornamentation above each nostril. Pinacosaurus mephistocephalus is known from just one specimen (also a juvenile), and it has long squamosal horns, no constriction in its snout, and no notch in the ornamentation above each nostril (it looks like it does on one side, but I think this is just damage given that it is not present on the other side). Both species are known from Bayan Mandahu, and so it is reasonable to ask whether or not these could represent the same taxon – given the differences in skull morphology, I suspect we're not looking at intraspecific variation here, although more specimens of P. mephistocephalus would be very helpful in this regard!

Crichtonsaurus becomes Crichtonpelta

Crichtonsaurus is another cool ankylosaur that has received surprisingly little attention given its Jurassic Park affinities. Two species have been named: Crichtonsaurus bohlini (the type species), and Crichtonsaurusbenxiensis. Crichtonsaurus bohlini is, unfortunately, a very incomplete jaw that does not bear any diagnostic features, and so we argue that Crichtonsaurus should be considered a nomen dubium. Crichtonsaurus benxiensis, on the other hand, is a great specimen with a really good skull and a fair bit of the postcrania, and the skull has some unique features that make it easy to distinguish from other taxa, most specifically the upturned quadratojugal horns. We've proposed the new name Crichtonpelta benxiensis for this material – Crichtonsaurus was a good name and we wanted to keep the replacement name similar, so now we have Crichton's shield instead of Crichton's lizard.

During the Flugsaurier symposium in 2010, while I was visiting Beijing and the IVPP, we took a field trip out to Liaoning and visited the Sihetun Fossil Site. It has a cool museum, including a mounted Crichtonpelta skeleton! I don't think this specimen has been described, but it does corroborate certain aspects of the holotype skull. Crichtonpelta seems to lack discrete caputegulae (tile-like ornamentation) on its skull, which gives it a similar appearance to Pinacosaurus. I don't think the osteoderms have been placed quite correctly on this skeletal mount – I think they've been tipped on their sides so that the keel forms part of the 'base', giving it a somewhat stegosaur-like appearance.

Liaoningosaurus and Chuanqilong

I'm going to talk more about Liaoningosaurus in a few months, but it is one cool little ankylosaur! At only about 30 cm long, the holotype is one of the smallest known ankylosaur specimens and probably represents a very young individual. There may be a few osteoderms in the cervical/scapular region, but that's about it. I've previously argued that the putative plastron in this specimen is more likely skin impressions, which is still pretty cool because we don't have a lot of belly skin for ankylosaurs. 

Liaoningosaurus! YAY!

I also wanted to give a shout out to here to Chuanqilong, a larger ankylosaur from Liaoning that was described last summer and which didn't make it into my thesis but which I did include in the revised phylogenetic analysis in the final paper.

Here's Chuanqilong, from Han et al. (2014).

Dongyangopelta, Taohelong, and Sauroplites

Let's finish off this post today with a triad of interesting but enigmatic ankylosaurs. Dongyangopelta and Taohelong are relatively new entries to the world of ankylosaurs, with both taxa appearing in 2013. Neither are particularly complete, but they are interesting because both species possess chunks of fused osteoderms, which would have been found over the pelvis and which are most commonly encountered in nodosaurids and 'polacanthids/polacanthines', and are presently unknown in ankylosaurids – and indeed, Yang et al. described Taohelong as the first example of a polacanthine from Asia. Nodosaurids (including 'polacanthines' as basal taxa within this clade) have been tentatively identified from Asia previously (an interesting but fragmentary specimen from Japan may be a nodosaurid), but to find a Polacanthus-like animal in Asia is unexpected and very interesting. The two species can be differentiated based on the morphology of these pelvic shield pieces. Dongyangopelta comes from the Chaochuan Formation, and another ankylosaur, Zhejiangosaurus, had been named from that formation in 2007; it may eventually shake out that Dongyangopelta is a junior synonym of Zhejiangosaurus, but in the absence of overlapping diagnostic material we opted to keep these taxa separate for now.

Pelvic shield fragments - Dongyangopelta redrawn from Chen et al. (2013), Taohelong redrawn from Yang et al. (2013), and Sauroplites redrawn from Bohlin (1953).

Sauroplites, on the other hand, is a very old name that has been largely overlooked in recent assessments of ankylosaurs. The material was originally described by Bohlin in 1953, but sadly the whereabouts of the original material is unknown today (although there are casts at the American Museum of Natural History). I think Sauroplites was overlooked for a while because it's based off of osteoderms alone, and it's hard to assess diagnostic characters in osteoderms sometimes because they vary so much along the body. This is partly why I like cervical half rings and pelvic shields – in these structures, you can understand the positions of the osteoderms on the body and directly compare patterns and morphologies across different taxa. Supposedly, the osteoderms for Sauroplites were preserved in their original positions when the specimen was excavated, and if so, it's a bit surprising that more of the skeleton was not preserved. Bohlin correctly identified some of these pieces as elements of the sacral armour, and the morphology of these pieces can be used to differentiate Sauroplites from Taohelong and Dongyangopelta, and we consider Sauroplites to be a valid, but poorly known, taxon. It's good to revisit poorly figured and fragmentary taxa from time to time, because new discoveries might help put those pieces in context.

Next time: we head south! See you then!


Arbour VM, Currie PJ. In press. Systematics, phylogeny and palaeobiogeography of the ankylosaurid dinosaurs. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

Woe betide those who summon the Galactic Coelacanth

A couple of years ago I had an existential crisis when I realized that, in the time one of my papers had been in review (almost 8 months!), I could nearly have physically created an entirely new human being in my body, if I had so chosen. Thus began the saddest game in the universe that I like to play when I submit a paper: "What kind of animal could have been gestated in the time this paper has been in review?". And this became an even better running joke when one of my colleagues had a highly unusual review experience that lasted for several years, which completely exhausted the gestation times of real animals.

My amazing and lovely sister saw us talking about this on Facebook and went ahead and wrote an R script that tells you exactly what kind of animal you could have birthed while waiting for reviewer comments. And because I am always forgetting to save this amazing piece of code, I've gotten permission from Jessica to post it here for posterity. My sincere apologies to anyone who gets the Space Whale, and my deepest condolences to anyone who is graced by the presence of the Galactic Coelacanth. 

Click here for the R script!
Updated 30 June 2015: If you don't have R, you can also download a text file to see the code!

Dinosaurs Unearthed!

Growing up in Nova Scotia, despite its many excellent and significant palaeontological treasures, meant that there weren't many dinosaur fossils for me to gawp at regularly. The Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History (which I loved) had only a few small fossils on display, and besides an exciting appearance by the Dinosauroid when I was small, did not have any big traveling dinosaur exhibits come through. But when I was in Grade 1 or so, DINAMATION came to town and seared its robotic dinosaurs all over my brain forever. And so I think I will forever have a soft spot in my heart for animatronic dinosaur displays.

Mike Burns and I ran into some of the old Dinamation robots puffing away at the New Mexico Museum back in 2012!

Like Jurassic Forest and Dino Dino Dreampark, the traveling exhibit Dinosaurs Unearthed (at Telus World of Science in Edmonton for the summer) mostly features large animatronic dinosaurs, as well as some casts and interactive displays.

One of the main focuses of the exhibit is showcasing Chinese dinosaurs and fossils, and talking about recent research on the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. Probably one of the best parts of the exhibit is the large number of casts of feathered dinosaurs from China, including Sinosauropteryx, Caudipteryx, Microraptor, and Confuciusornis. These are still not particularly household names, so it's nice to see these on display, especially given the lack of feathers in Jurassic World's dinosaurs!

Just past the casts we have a diorama of Jehol Biota feathered dinosaurs, including (from left to right) the dromaeosaur Microraptor, the compsognathid Sinosauropteryx, the tyrannosaur Dilong, and the bird Confuciusornis. Some of the animatronics are better than others, and all are kind of weirdly oversized, but I think if there was a sign that said this was a diorama at 4x life size or something like that, that it would work pretty well.

My favourite cluster of dinosaurs was the set of Mongolian dinosaurs, including the first time I've ever seen Gigantoraptor anywhere! There's also a pretty dapper Alxasaurus in the front there.

I would have liked to see more cast fossils rather than sculpted reconstructions, and perhaps more fossils overall and a couple fewer animatronics. But generally the information presented in the exhibit was pretty good and had been recently updated, with references to the new research on Brontosaurus, and lots of recent behavioural, biomechanics, and ecology facts as well. Here's a nice display showcasing some of the cool imaging work done by the WitmerLab!

Until next time...watch out for that Shantungosaurus as you leave!