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Partial bone shafts found in Late Triassic rock in England might represent a sauropodomorph, similar to this Plateosaurus, or an entirely different kind of creature. Photo by FunkMonk, image from Wikipedia.

Dinosaur giants are among the most famous Mesozoic celebrities. Yet the dinosaur growth spurt didn’t start just as soon as Eoraptor and kin evolved. For most of the Triassic, the first act in their story, dinosaurs were small and gracile creatures, with the first relatively large dinosaurs being the sauropodomorphs of the Late Triassic. Even then, Plateosaurus and kin didn’t come close to the truly enormous sizes of their later relatives–such as Diplodocus and Futalognkosaurus. Discerning when dinosaurs started to bulk up is difficult, however, and made all the more complicated by a set of enigmatic bones found in England.

The fossils at the heart of the in-press Acta Palaeontologica Polonica study, as described by University of Cape Town paleontologist Ragna Redelstorff and coauthors, have been known to researchers for a long time. During the mid-19th century, naturalists described at least five large, incomplete shafts found in the Late Triassic rock of southwest England’s Aust Cliff. Two of these fossils were later destroyed, but, drawing from the surviving specimens and illustrations of the lost bones, paleontologist Peter Galton proposed in 2005 that they came from large dinosaurs that lived over 200 million years ago. In particular, two of the bones resembled stegosaur bones, which would have extended the origin of the armored dinosaurs further back than previously thought.

Not everyone agreed with Galton’s proposal. The bone shafts could be from as-yet-unknown sauropods, some paleontologists argued, while other researchers pointed out that the lack of distinctive features on the bones were unidentifiable beyond the level of “tetrapod” (the major group of vertebrates descended from fish with limbs, similar to Tiktaalik). The bones came from big creatures–possibly more than 20 feet long, based on comparisons to other fossils–but the identity of the Aust Cliff animals is unknown.

Since the outside of the bone shafts provide so little information about their identity, Redelstorff and collaborators looked to the microstructure of two specimens for new clues. While the histological evidence appears to show that the sampled bones belonged to the same species, the authors argue, each individual shows different growth strategies. One bone shaft came from a slightly bigger, rapidly growing individual, while the smaller bone represents an older animal that regularly experienced temporary halts in growth (visible as lines called LAGs in the bone). Why this should be so isn’t clear, but Redelstorff and coauthors suggest individual variation, differences between the sexes or ecological factors as possible causes.

But what sort of animals were the Aust Cliff creatures? When the researchers compared their sample with three kinds of dinosaurs–sauropods, archaic sauropodomorphs and stegosaurs–and Triassic croc cousins called pseudosuchians, the pseudosuchians seemed to be the closest match. Indeed, while the researchers concluded that the “Aust Cliff bones simply do not offer a good match with any previously described histologies,” the specimens appeared to share more in common with those of croc-line archosaurs than with dinosaurs.

This isn’t to say that the Aust Cliff animals were definitely large psuedosuchians, like the recently named Smok. As the researchers point out, the specimens contained a type of bone tissue not previously seen in pseudosuchians–either these animals were not pseudosuchians, or these pseudosuchians were a previously unknown histology. And, Redelstorff and collaborators point out, the bones might be attributable to a sauropodomorph named Camelotia that is found in the same deposits. Studying the bone microstructure of Smok and Camelotia for comparison would be a logical next step in efforts to narrow down the identity of the Aust Cliff animals. Until then, this early “experiment” in gigantism–as Redelstorff and colleagues call it–remains an unresolved puzzle.

Still, the study highlights the importance of building a deep database of paleohistological samples. Had the researchers sampled just one bone, they may have come to the conclusion that all bones of that type would exhibit the same life history–either rapid, continuous growth or a stop-and-go pattern, depending on which they studied. Together, the bones show variations in the natural history of what is presumably the same species, which brings up the question of how quirks of environment, biology and natural history are recorded in bone. If we are going to understand the biology of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, we need to cut into as many bones as we can to understand how variable and biologically flexible the creatures truly were.

Reference:

Redelstorff , R., Sander, P., Galton, P. 2012. Unique bone histology in partial large bone shafts from Aust Cliff (England, Upper Triassic): an early independent experiment in gigantism. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica  http://dx.doi.org/10.4202/app.2012.0073

A mount of Cetiosaurus at the New Walk Museum in Leicester. While the neck of this sauropod is almost completely known, no skull has ever been described. Photo by Flickr user Paul Stainthorp.

Sauropods were magnificent dinosaurs. These long-necked, small-headed titans were unlike anything that has evolved before or since, and they were so strange that paleontologists are still debating the basics of how Apatosaurus and kin actually lived. As iconic as their skeletons are now, though, the first sauropod ever described was initially envisioned as a very different sort of creature. The great Cetiosaurus was originally seen as a gargantuan, plesiosaur-crunching crocodile.

In 1841, the British anatomist Richard Owen described a curious collection of limb bones and vertebrae found at various locations in England. The limb elements reminded Owen of the same bones in crocodiles, and the vertebrae were reminiscent of those in whales. The scattered elements seemed to correspond in structure to aquatic animals, and since function was dictated by skeletal form, Owen believed that Cetiosaurus–the “whale lizard”–must have been a marine predator larger than anything that had been found before.

The following year, in his massive Report on British fossil reptiles, Part II, Owen reassessed the various prehistoric reptiles from his country. This was the landmark monograph in which Owen coined the term “Dinosauria,” but he didn’t include Cetiosaurus within the newly named group. The animal seemed vastly different from Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus. Dinosaurs, in Owen’s view, were terrestrial animals with upright limbs, and he saw Cetiosaurus as a marine carnivore. Owen grouped the poorly known animals with crocodiles, instead.

It wasn’t until 1869 that Cetiosaurus was formally recognized as a dinosaur. Thomas Henry Huxley, Owen’s chief academic rival, proposed that Cetiosaurus was a close relative of Iguanodon, although he later changed his mind and suggested that the puzzling animal was an oddball that didn’t belong with crocodiles or dinosaurs. Other researchers were more confident that Cetiosaurus belonged among the dinosaurs. John Phillips, in an 1871 monograph, proposed that Cetiosaurus was an herbivorous dinosaur, and in 1875 Owen conceded that his creature was a huge, aquatic dinosaur.

Like many other early dinosaur finds, the identity of Cetiosaurus was obscured by a lack of material and the unfamiliarity of the Mesozoic curiosities. When O.C. Marsh, E.D. Cope and other North American paleontologists began to uncover relatively complete skeletons of dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and “Brontosaurus” from the American West during the late 19th century, a more accurate vision of Cetiosaurus as a sauropod started to come into focus. All the same, researchers named multiple species of this dinosaur from various sites of different ages. Cetiosaurus became a taxonomic wastebasket for numerous scrappy sauropods found in England.

Paleontologists Paul Upchurch and John Martin sorted out the mess in 2003. Out of 13 different species named from bones belonging to different kinds of sauropods that lived millions of years apart, Upchurch and Martin recognized only one valid taxon–Cetiosaurus oxoniensis. This sauropod trod Jurassic England around 170 million years ago. And even though our knowledge of this dinosaur’s skeleton isn’t yet complete, discoveries both old and new have helped paleontologists outline what this historically significant dinosaur was like.

In 1868, quarry workers at Bletchingdon Station (near Oxford, England) uncovered a Cetiosaurus bonebed containing a trio of skeletons, one being much larger than the others. These bones formed the basis of Phillips’ study of the dinosaur, and, as Upchurch and Martin noted, “potentially represents one of the best preserved sauropods from the Jurassic of Europe.” A century later, in 1968, workers at Williamson Cliffe Brickworks in Rutland discovered bones in their quarry, and some of the remains were briefly described by M.D. Jones in 1970. Upchurch and Martin reexamined the Rutland material as part of their bigger Cetiosaurus project and found that the individual dinosaur is represented by an almost complete neck, various parts of the spinal column and limb elements, making it one of the best-preserved Cetiosaurus ever found.

Altogether, the bones of Cetiosaurus indicate that the sauropod was medium to large in size, though exactly how big this dinosaur was isn’t clear. (Estimating the length and mass of incompletely-known dinosaurs is a difficult task.) What makes Cetiosaurus of special interest to paleontologists, though, is that it was a relatively archaic form of sauropod. Most of the famous sauropods–Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus and their ilk–belong to lineages within a big group called the neosauropoda. Cetiosaurus seems to fall just outside this group, and so the dinosaur might clue paleontologists in to what sauropods were like just before the fantastic radiation of neosauropods during the Late Jurassic. It took three decades to change the animal from a crocodile to a dinosaur, and a century more for the sauropod’s identity to be untangled, but, now that the dinosaur has a definite name and evolutionary identity, paleontologists can start to investigate the biological secrets locked inside Cetiosaurus bones.

Check out previous entries in the Dinosaur Alphabet here.

References:

Naish, D. 2009. The Great Dinosaur Discoveries. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 30-31

Upchurch, P., Martin, J. 2003. The Anatomy and Taxonomy of Cetiosaurus (Saurischia, Sauropoda) from the Middle Jurassic of England. Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 23 (1): 208–231

Upchurch, P., Martin, J. 2002. The Rutland Cetiosaurus: the anatomy and relationships of a Middle Jurassic British sauropod dinosaur. Palaeontology, 45: 1049–1074.

Wilson, J. 2005. Overview of sauropod phylogeny and evolution, pp. 15-49  in Curry Rogers and Wilson (eds.), The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology, Berkley: University of California Press.

The peculiar, high-spined specimen that represents Becklespinax (left), and two possible restorations of the dinosaur by Darren Naish (right). From Naish and Martill, 2007.

Poor, neglected Becklespinax. Although this gaudy, sail-backed theropod was an impressive predator at the time it strode across England around 140 million years ago, the fragmentary remains of this dinosaur have a tangled history only recently highlighted by the discovery of a more completely-known relative. In the history of paleontology, Becklespinax the tale is a tragedy.

The bones of Becklespinax were among the earliest spate of dinosaur discoveries in England, before anyone really understand just how many dinosaurs there were and how widely they varied in form. No surprise, then, that when the British anatomist Richard Owen illustrated a strange set of three high-spined vertebrae in 1855, he assigned them to the carnivorous dinosaur Megalosaurus. After all, Megalosaurus was already a hodgepodge of theropod remains from different eras, so it’s no altogether surprising that Owen considered the strange vertebrae as part of the same animal. He was confident enough in his assessment that when Owen schooled the artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in dinosaur anatomy for the famous Crystal Palace reconstructions, the anatomist instructed the sculptor to give Megalosaurus a hump between the shoulders on account of the elongated neural spines in the one specimen.

Along with teeth and other bits, the strange sting of vertebrae were thrown together into the species Megalosaurus dunkeri by researchers such as Richard Lydekker. No one found any complete skeleton–just scattered pieces. Then, in 1926, paleontologist Friedrich von Huene proposed that the spines and teeth of this “Megalosaurus” were so different from others of its type that it deserved its own genus–”Altispinax.” So scientists kicked the name Altispinax around for awhile, but this was another hodgepodge dinosaur consisting of various specimens from different places and time periods. In 1991, dinosaur fan George Olshevsky suggested that the set of three vertebrae carry the name Becklespinax altispinax, and, so far, that name has stuck.

But just what sort of dinosaur was Becklespinax? Paleontologist and prolific blogger Darren Naish addressed this question a few years back. The dinosaur was clearly a relatively large theropod, probably over 20 feet long. But, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was no other dinosaur quite like it. Without a more complete skeleton, it was impossible to tell. And even after other big theropods with elongated spines on their backs were discovered–such as the croc-snouted Spinosaurus from the Late Cretaceous of Africa and the deep-skulled Acrocanthosaurus from the Early Cretaceous of North America–the anatomy of Becklespinax didn’t match those forms.

Even worse, the extremely limited material confounded paleontologists who attempted to figure out what the back of Becklespinax looked like. Were those elongated spines a sign of a high sail that ran most of the length of the dinosaur’s back, as in Spinosaurus? Or did it indicate a short, high ornament near the hips? Naish illustrated both possibilities in a 2007 paper he wrote with colleague David Martill. The first vertebral spine contained yet another puzzle. This bone was shorter than the following two. This might have been a pathology, or even because the bones came from the front part of the sail as it was building to its full height. No one knew for sure.

Then along came Concavenator. In 2010, paleontologist Francisco Ortega and colleagues named this carnivorous dinosaur on the basis of a gorgeous, 130-million-year-old skeleton found in Spain. A cousin of the high-spined Acrocanthosaurus from North America, Concavenator also had a weird backbone–the carcharodontosaur had a high, shark-fin-shaped sail just in front of the hips.

In over a century and a half, no one has ever found a better or more complete specimen of the English dinosaur, yet Concavenator offered a glimmer of what Becklespinax might have looked like. Both were sail-backed theropods that lived in the Early Cretaceous of Europe. And while our knowledge of Becklespinax is frustratingly incomplete, the resemblance of the dinosaur’s known remains to the corresponding parts in Concavenator suggest that Becklespinax, too, was a sail-backed carcharodontosaur. Their relationship may even go deeper. While the two dinosaurs lived about 10 million years apart, Naish pointed out, it’s possible that both dinosaur species belong to the same genus. Concavenator corcovatus might, in fact, be rightly called Becklespinax corcovatus. Without a fuller view of what the skeleton of Becklespinax looked like, though, it’s impossible to tell.

Whatever Becklespinax is, paleontologists have almost certainly found other scraps from this dinosaur. The trick is correctly identifying and assembling the scattered pieces. It takes years to untangle the history and form of dinosaurs found during the 19th century, as paleontologist Roger Benson did with Megalosaurus. A skeleton–even a partial one–would be even better. Such a discovery would go a long way towards outlining the nature of the frustratingly-incomplete Becklespinax, although other questions would certainly remain.

Between Acrocanthosaurus, Becklespinax and Concavenator, the massive carcharodontosaurs of the Early Cretaceous were apparently well-decorated predators that bore distinctive ridges and sails on their backs. Why? What good would such ornaments be to large predators? Were they signals of dominance, advertisements of sexual desirability or even just easily-seen markers that an individual belonged to this species and not that one? No one knows. As debates about sexual selection and dinosaur ornamentation heat up, even rapacious carnivores will have a role to play.

Previous posts in this series:

A is for Agujaceratops

Reference:

Naish, D., and Martill, D. 2007. Dinosaurs of Great Britain and the role of the Geological Society of London in their discovery: basal Dinosauria and Saurischia. Journal of the Geological Society, 164 (3), 493-510 DOI: 10.1144/0016-76492006-032

Ortega, F., Escaso, F., and Sanz, J. 2010. A bizarre, humped Carcharodontosauria (Theropoda) from the Lower Cretaceous of Spain Nature, 467 (7312), 203-206 DOI: 10.1038/nature09181

Stovall, J., & Langston, W. 1950. Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, a new genus and species of Lower Cretaceous Theropoda from Oklahoma. American Midland Naturalist, 43 (3): 696–728. doi:10.2307/2421859

A reconstruction of an adult and juvenile Thecodontosaurus. From Benton, 2012.

When British anatomist Richard Owen coined the term “Dinosauria” in 1842, there were nowhere near as many dinosaurs known as there are today. And even among that paltry lot, most specimens were isolated scraps that required a great deal of interpretation and debate to get right. The most famous of these enigmatic creatures were Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus–a trio of prehistoric monsters that cemented the Dinosauria as a distinct group. But they weren’t the only dinosaurs that paleontologists had found.

Almost 20 years before he established the Dinosauria, Owen named what he thought was an ancient crocodile on the basis of a tooth. He called the animal Suchosaurus, and only recently did paleontologists realize that the dental fossil actually belonged to a spinosaur, one of the heavy-clawed, long-snouted fish-eaters such as Baryonyx. Likewise, other naturalists and explorers discovered remnants of dinosaurs in North America and Europe prior to 1842, but no one knew what most of these fragments and fossil tidbits actually represented. Among these discoveries was the sauropodomorph Thecodontosaurus–a dinosaur forever connected with Bristol, England.

Paleontologist Mike Benton of the University of Bristol has traced the early history of Thecodontosaurus in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. The story of the dinosaur’s discovery began in 1834, when reports of remains from “saurian animals” started to filter out of Bristol’s limestone quarries. Quarry workers took some of the bones to the local Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Arts so that the local curator, Samuel Stutchbury, could see them. Yet Stutchbury was away at the time, so the bones were also shown to his paleontologist colleague Henry Riley, and when he returned Stutchbury was excited enough by the finds to ask quarrymen to bring him more specimens. He wasn’t the only one, though. David Williams–a country parson and geologist–had a similar idea, so Stutchbury teamed up with paleontologist Henry Riley in an academic race to describe the unknown creature.

All three naturalists issued reports and were aware of each other’s work. They collected isolated bones and skeletal fragments, studied them and communicated their preliminary thoughts to their colleagues at meeting and in print. In an 1835 paper, Williams even went so far as to suppose that the enigmatic, unnamed animal “may have formed a link between the crocodiles and the lizards proper”–not an evolutionary statement, but a proposal that the reptile slotted neatly into a static, neatly-graded hierarchy of Nature.

Riley, Stutchbury and Williams had become aware of the fossils around the same time in 1834. Yet Stuchbury and Williams, especially, were distrustful of each other. Stutchbury felt that Williams was poaching his fossils, and Williams thought Stutchbury was being selfish in trying to hoard all the fossils in the Bristol Institution. All the while, both parties worked on their own monographs about the animal.

Ultimately, Riley and Stuchbury came out on top. Williams lacked enough material to match the collection Riley and Stutchbury were working from, and he didn’t push to turn his 1835 report into a true description. He bowed out–and rightly felt snubbed by the other experts who had higher social standing–leaving the prehistoric animal to Riley and Stutchbury. No one knows why it took so long, but Riley and Stutchbury gave a talk about their findings in 1836, completed their paper in 1838 and finally published it in 1840. All the same, the abstract for their 1836 talk named the animal Thecodontosaurus and provided a short description–enough to establish the creature’s name in the annals of science.

But Thecodontosaurus was not immediately recognized as a dinosaur. The concept of a “dinosaur” was still six years away, and, even then, Richard Owen did not include Thecodontosaurus among his newly-established Dinosauria. Instead, Thecodontosaurus was thought to be a bizarre, enigmatic reptile that combined traits seen in both lizards and crocodiles, just as Williams had said. It wasn’t until 1870 that Thomas Henry Huxley recognized that Thecodontosaurus was a dinosaur–now known to be one of the archaic, Triassic cousins of the later sauropod dinosaurs. Thecodontosaurus only held the faintest glimmerings of what was to come, though. This sauropodomorph had a relatively short neck and still ran about on two legs.

The tale of Thecodontosaurus was not only a story of science. It’s also a lesson about the way class and politics influenced discussion and debate about prehistoric life. Social standing and institutional resources gave some experts an edge over their equally enthusiastic peers. Paleontologists still grapple with these issues. Who can describe certain fossils, who has permission to work on a particular patch of rock and the contributions avocational paleontologists can make to the field are all areas of tension that were felt just as acutely in the early 19th century. Dinosaur politics remain entrenched.

For more information, visit Benton’s exhaustively-detailed “Naming the Bristol Dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus” website.

Reference:

Benton, M. (2012). Naming the Bristol dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus: politics and science in the 1830s Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 766-778 DOI: 10.1016/j.pgeola.2012.07.012

In 1938, dinosaurs roamed the streets of Birmingham, England. Sort of. The three monsters–tottering constructions of plywood and car parts–trundled along in a parade meant to celebrate the transformation of the town from its prehistoric origins to a major industrial center. Best of all, io9 has found some footage of the grotesque dinosaurs in action. The clip is short, but you can see the trio of Egbert, Ogbert and Little Sidney taunt the accompanying guard of a hundred anachronistic cavemen. By the time of the “Stone Age,” the non-avian dinosaurs were long gone–humans never met such creatures. All the same, I have to admire the ingenuity of the people who constructed the parade dinosaurs. As io9′s Cyriaque Lamar suggested, organizing a formation of smoke-bellowing dinosaurs “is how every anniversary should be commemorated, regardless of the occasion.”