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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 reconstruction of an Einiosaurus skull in a ceratopsid gallery at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Photo by Maarten Heerlien, image from Wikipedia.

Xenoceratops was a gnarly-looking ceratopsid. There’s no doubt about that. Much like its horned kin, the dinosaur sported a distinctive array of head ornaments from the tip of its nose to the back of its frill. But that’s hardly the entire story behind this newly named dinosaur.

Contrary to many news reports that focused almost entirely on the dinosaur’s appearance, the real importance of Xenoceratops is in its geological and evolutionary context. The dinosaur is the first identifiable ceratopsid from the relatively unexplored Foremost Formation in Canada, and the creature appears to be at the base of a major horned dinosaur subdivision called centrosaurines. While the dinosaur’s name is certainly aesthetically pleasing, Knight Science Journalism Tracker watchdog Charlie Petit rightly pointed out that the ceratopsid isn’t really any more or less fantastic-looking than close cousins such as Styracosaurus, Spinops and Pachyrhinosaurus. The real importance of the dinosaur–a new data point in an ongoing investigation of a little-known part of the Cretaceous–was obscured by a narrowed focus on the dinosaur’s spiky headgear.

Dinosaurs are perpetually struggling to find context in news reports. Indeed, Xenoceratops is just the latest example and not an anomaly. Theropod dinosaurs are often introduced as Tyrannosaurus rex relatives, even when they’re not particularly closely related to the tyrant king, and journalists had such a fun time giggling over calling Kosmoceratops the “horniest dinosaur ever” that the clues the ceratopsid offered about dinosaur evolution in western North America were almost entirely overlooked. Reports on newly discovered dinosaurs usually contain the vital statistics of when the animal lived, where it was found, how large it was and whatever feature strikes our immediate attention, but the tales dinosaurs have to tell about life, death, evolution and extinction are rarely pulled out by journalistic storytellers.

Fossils don’t divulge their stories all at once, though. Paleontologists spend years drawing paleobiological secrets from dinosaur bones–who was related to whom, grand evolutionary patterns and rates of faunal turnover, and how the animals actually lived. These slowly emerging lines of evidence don’t often receive the same degree of attention. The discovery of a new bizarre species immediately garners journalistic attention, but once the dinosaur has been added to the roster, details about the animal’s life are often forgotten unless the creature earns a new superlative or has been found to have some tenuous connection to T. rex.

Rather than just gripe, though, I want to highlight how discovering and naming a dinosaur is only the initial step in paleontology’s effort to reconstruct prehistoric life. Consider Einiosaurus procurvicornis, a dinosaur I’m selecting here for no other reason than I promised a friend that I’d write about the dinosaur soon.

In 1995, paleontologist Scott Sampson named Einiosaurus from remains of multiple individuals strewn through two bonebeds discovered in Montana’s Late Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation. A geologically younger relative of Xenoceratops by about 4 million years, adults of this ceratopsid species are immediately recognizable by a forward-curved nasal horn, a pair of long, straight spikes jutting from the back of the frill and a suite of more subtle cranial ornaments.

Even before Einiosaurus had a name, though, researchers knew that the collected bones of this dinosaur presented a rich fossil database. Five years before Sampson’s paper, paleontologist Raymond Rogers drew on the two ceratopsid bonebeds to argue that multiple individuals of the species had died in prehistoric droughts. Rather than being places where the bodies of solitary animals accumulated over time, Rogers proposed, the rich assemblages recorded mass mortality events which claimed young and old ceratopsids alike.

The bone assemblages and their geological context outline many tragic dinosaur deaths. But clues about dinosaur lives are preserved inside those bones. For her master’s work at Montana State University, paleontologist Julie Reizner examined the bone microstructure of 16 Einiosaurus tibiae from a single bonebed to reconstruct how these dinosaurs grew and outline their population structure.

The research is still awaiting publication in a journal, but according to Reizner’s 2010 thesis and a poster she presented at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting last month, the histological evidence indicates that these horned dinosaurs grew rapidly until about three to five years of age, when their growth significantly slowed. The dinosaurs did not cease growing entirely, but, Reizner hypothesizes, the slowdown might represent the onset of sexual maturity. Additionally, all the dinosaurs in her sample were either juveniles or subadults–there were no infants or adults (or dinosaurs that had reached skeletal maturity and ceased growing). Even among the two groups, there doesn’t seem to be a continuum of sizes but instead a sharper delineation between juveniles and subadults. If this Einiosaurus bonebed really does represent a herd or part of a herd that died at about the same time, the age gap might mean that Einiosaurus had breeding seasons that occurred only during a restricted part of the year, thus creating annual gaps between broods.

Restored soft tissue profile of Einiosaurus, modified from Hieronymus et al., 2009.

Other researchers have drawn from different bony indicators to restore what the faces of Einiosaurus and similar dinosaurs would have looked like. While the underlying ornamental structures are still prominent in ceratopsid skulls, the horns, bosses and spikes would have been covered in tough sheaths. Thus, in 2009, Tobin Hieronymus and colleagues used the relationship between facial integument and bone in living animals to reconstruct the extent of skin and horn on ceratopsids. While the preservation of the Einiosaurus material frustrated their efforts to detect all the skin and horn structures on the skull, Hieronymus and colleagues confirmed that the nasal horn was covered in a tough sheath and that Einiosaurus had large, rounded scales over the eyes. Artists can’t simply stretch skin over the dinosaur’s skull in restorations–the bone itself shows the presence of soft tissue ornamentation that rotted away long ago.

As with most dinosaur species, we still know relatively little about the biology of Einiosaurus. We are limited to what is preserved in the rock, the technologies at our disposal and the state of paleontological theory. All the same, Einiosaurus is much more than a pretty face. The dinosaur was part of a rich, complex Cretaceous ecosystem, and one in a cast of billions in earth’s evolutionary drama. To me, at least, that is the most entrancing aspect of paleontology. We have only barely begun to plumb the depths of dinosaur diversity, and researchers will continue to introduce us to new species at a breakneck pace, but the true wonder and joy of paleontology lies in pursuing questions about the lives of animals we’ll sadly never observe in the flesh.

References:

Hieronymus, T., Witmer, L., Tanke, D., Currie, P. 2009. The facial integument of centrosaurine ceratopsids: Morphological and histological correlates of novel skin structures. The Anatomical Record 292: 1370-1396

Reizner, J. 2010. An ontogenetic series and population histology of the ceratopsid dinosaur Einiosaurus procurvicornis. Montana State University master’s thesis: 1-97

Rogers, R. 1990. Taphonomy of three dinosaur bone beds in the Upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of northwestern Montana: evidence for drought-related mortality. PALAIOS 5 (5): 394–413.

Sampson, S. 1995. Two new horned dinosaurs from the Upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of Montana; with a phylogenetic analysis of the Centrosaurinae (Ornithischia: Ceratopsidae). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 15 (4): 743–760.

A reconstruction of Acrocanthosaurus at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina, where this year’s SVP reception was held. Photo by Famille Wielosz-Caron, image from Wikipedia.

The annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting is a test of endurance. The science comes fast and furious in presentations, posters, hallway conversations and shouted exchanges over the din of the bar, with no consideration for how dehydrated, weary or hungover you might be. (Paleontologists study hard and party harder.) By the last day, my brain ached with details of flying Microraptor, bounding crocodiles, marsupial bone microstructure and dozens of other topics. When my friends at the conference asked “What did you like best?” after the technical sessions finally concluded, I was only capable of grunts and indelicate gestures.

I’ve had a day to settle down and process what I saw. And I know this–at SVP, dinosaurs rule. This isn’t to say that the conference is all about the Mesozoic celebrities. I saw many excellent talks on prehistoric fish, mammals, amphibians and other forms of ancient life. But, for a dinosaur fan, SVP offers a glut of dinosaur science from new discoveries about the beloved Tyrannosaurus rex to brand-new species that have only just come out of the ground.  Since this blog is called Dinosaur Tracking, I’m going to focus on some of the stand-out dinosaur science I saw during the meeting.

Montana State University graduate student Jade Simon’s presentation focused on giant Cretaceous dinosaur eggs found in Idaho, but the implications of the discovery were what really grabbed by attention. According to Simon and her collaborators, the pair of elongated, oblong eggs most closely match those found in the nests of oviraptorosaurs–beaked, feathered theropods like Citipati and eponymous Oviraptor. Yet the two eggs were so large that they suggested a dinosaur of prodigious size, on the scale of the 25-foot-long Gigantoraptor recently found in China. If Simon and coauthors are correct, then an enormous, as-yet-undiscovered oviraptorosaur strutted around Idaho around 100 million years ago. The next step–finding this fantastic creature’s bones.

Simon wasn’t the only researcher showing off dinosaur eggs. Just prior to her presentation, meeting attendees were treated to a pair of talks about dinosaur embryos found in the Late Jurassic rock of Portugal. These deposits are similar in age to those of the famous Morrison Formation of the American west and share many of the same types of dinosaurs. An embryo studied by Ricardo Araújo and coauthors appears to be a nascent Torvosaurus–a giant Jurassic carnivore that topped Allosaurus in bulk–and paleontologist Octávio Mateus followed with a skeletal embryo of Lourinhanosaurus, a mid-size theropod dinosaur found in the same formation. The embryo described by Mateus stood out because it was found by his parents–amateur paleontologists–in a nest of 100 eggs, including crocodile eggs mixed in with those of dinosaurs. Was this nest a communal site used by many mothers? The embryo and the nest it was found in will definitely help us better understand how some baby dinosaurs entered the world.

The SVP crowd also got treated to previews of various dinosaurs that are slowly making their way to press. Researcher Corwin Sullivan presented some scrappy evidence that a second giant tyrannosaur might have lived alongside the recently named Zhuchengtyrannus, and Nathan Smith showed off some new material from what may be two new species of sauropodomorph dinosaurs collected from Antarctica. Oliver Rauhut added to the list with a new theropod from Argentina that looks like a more archaic version of Allosaurus, and visitors to the poster session got to check out what might be a new species of Diabloceratops that Eric Lund and his colleagues have been working on. Most of the new dinosaur presentations followed the same format–where the fossils were found, how much of the skeleton was found, what sort of dinosaur the species is–but, in time, we should get fuller details of these dinosaurs in progress.

But not all the presentations at the conference were on new field discoveries. Increasingly, paleontologists are scanning, slicing and otherwise studying fossils in new ways, drawing ever more data about dinosaur biology from old bones. The first talk I walked into, by Eric Snively, reconstructed the neck musculature of Allosaurus for insights into the feeding behavior of this Jurassic hypercarnivore. As it turned out, Allosaurus probably had quite a strong neck and used this power to stabilized its flexed head while ripping flesh from prey–think of a giant, toothy falcon. In another session, Jason Bourke created virtual models to examine whether sauropod dinosaurs such as Camarasaurus and Diplodocus had their nasal openings on the tops of their heads–as was shown when I was a kid–or had nostrils further down the snout. The airflow models better fit the nose-at-end-of-snout model, although, as Bourke pointed out, there’s still quite a bit we don’t know about sauropod soft tissues.

Unsurprisingly, Tyrannosaurus got some love, too. Sara Burch reexamined the shoulders and forelimbs of old T. rex in an attempt to reconstruct the dinosaur’s musculature. Among other things, Burch found that the dinosaur’s arms underwent significant functional changes over time. The arms of the tyrant weren’t fading away, but modified for different uses than that of earlier relatives. What exactly the dinosaur was doing with its infamously small arms, though, we still don’t know.

Within the various new areas of research, though, dinosaur histology has been providing paleontologists with some of the most tantalizing details of prehistoric biology. My friend Carolyn Levitt presented her new research on the microstructure of Kosmoceratops and Utahceratops bones. These horned dinosaurs didn’t show any lines of arrested growth (LAGs) in their bones–rings thought to mark annual slowdowns in bone growth and often used to roughly age dinosaurs–while previously studied dinosaurs from more northern sites in North America do show these markers. This might mean that, like mammals, dinosaurs maintained high-running metabolisms but their growth was still influenced by environmental pressures, such as cold or dry seasons, in their surrounding environment. In a time of scarce resources, dinosaurs in highly seasonal habitats probably slowed their growth while those in lusher environments did not face the same pressures. Indeed, the dinosaurs with the most LAGs were the northernmost, while Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops were the southernmost sampled.

In a similar vein, a poster by Julie Reizner looked at the histology of the horned dinosaur Einiosaurus and what the microstructure details might say about the ceratopsid’s biology. The sampled dinosaurs, found in a rich bonebed, suggest that growth in Einiosaurus slowed at about three to five years of age, which might mean that these dinosaurs made a dash for reproductive maturity before their growth slowed. The fact that Reizner’s animals were predominately young and perished long before full skeletal maturity–or, in other words, still had some growing to do–is consistent with the idea that dinosaurs generally lived fast and died young.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there was an entire session devoted to Appalachia–a Late Cretaceous subcontinent formed when a shallow sea split North America in two, of which my former New Jersey home was a part. Paleontologists have made fascinating discoveries on the sister continent, Laramidia, but Appalachia has often been ignored given that we as yet knew little of the dinosaurs that lived there. Still, there is much to be learned by going back to the fragmentary and rare dinosaurs of that early eastern landmass. In addition to featuring Dryptosaurus, New Jersey’s fearsome tyrannosauroid, Stephen Brusatte reexamined the few remains of “Ornithomimus” antiquus. This ostrich-like dinosaur probably belonged to a different genus and was not as primitive as previously thought. Shortly after Brusatte’s talk, Matthew Vavrek spoke about dinosaurs found in the high Arctic of Appalachia. Hadrosaurs, deinonychosaurs, tyrannosaurs and others lived along the northwestern coast of the continent and may help use better understand the differences between Appalachia and Laramidia. The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that the eastern dinosaurs are so poorly known–we need more dinosaurs.

The findings I mention here are just a scattered sampling of SVP, based upon the talks and posters I personally encountered. With three sessions going at the same time, it was utterly impossible to see everything. (Please chime in about your own favorite presentations in the comments.) Nevertheless, it was amazing to see paleontologists showing off new finds and going back to fossil collections for new information. We’re learning more, at a faster rate, than ever before. As multiple experts said to me during this conference, it’s a great time to be a paleontologist. The SVP dinosaur sessions left no doubt of that, and I can hardly wait for next year.

Thankfully, many other paleontologists have been sharing their thoughts about the conference through the #2012SVP Twitter hashtag and on their blogs. For an outsider’s perspective on the conference, see Bora Zivkovic’s rundown of the meeting, as well as Victoria Arbour’s summary of SVP silliness. Out of everything, though, I think this year’s attendees will all remember the conference center’s whoopee cushion chairs–caught on video by Casey Holliday’s lab. I hope that next year’s conference in Los Angeles is just as exhausting, and just as fun.

A partial Tenontosaurus skeleton on display at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. Photo by the author.

Tenontosaurus is a difficult dinosaur to describe. This beaked herbivore—a distant, roughly 110-million-year-old cousin of the more famous Iguanodon—didn’t have any spectacular spikes, horns, plates, or claws. In short, Tenontosaurus was a vanilla dinosaur, and is probably most famous for being the prey of the “terrible claw” Deinonychus. But there is something very important about the unassuming plant-eater: Paleontologists have collected a lot of them. There are at least 30 complete or partial Tenontosaurus skeletons in museums across the country, including everything from very young dinosaurs to adults. With such a sample size, paleontologists can compare skeletons to dig into the dinosaur’s biology, and University of California at Berkeley paleontologist Sarah Werning has done just that. In a paper just published in PLoS One, Werning details how Tenontosaurus grew up.

The secret to Tenontosaurus growth is in the bones themselves. The microscopic structure of dinosaur bone contains clues to how rapidly the dinosaurs grew and what was happening to them at the time of death. For this study, Werning created slides from sections of Tenontosaurus long bones—the humerus, ulna, femur, tibia and fibula—to tease out the history of each animal and the larger pattern of how the dinosaur changed with age.

During early life, Tenontosaurus grew quickly. “Throughout early ontogeny and into subadulthood,” Werning writes, “Tenontosaurus tilletti is characterized by bone tissues associated with fast growth.” But the dinosaur didn’t maintain this quick pace during its entire life. Sometime in its adolescence, perhaps around the time Tenontosaurus began reproducing, the dinosaur’s growth rate slowed. (Working with colleague Andrew Lee, Werning previously found that Tenontosaurus and other dinosaurs started having sex before they reached full size.) The dinosaur kept growing, but at a much slower rate, until it eventually reached skeletal maturity and its growth all but ceased.

This kind of growth pattern wasn’t unique to Tenontosaurus. Similar and closely related dinosaurs, such as Rhabdodon and Zalmoxes, appear to have grown quickly in their youth before slowing down sometime in their subadult lives. But not all ornithopod dinosaurs grew this way.

Tenontosaurus, Rhabdodon, Zalmoxes and similar dinosaurs were all on branches near the base of a major dinosaur group called the Iguanodontia. This group also contains Iguanodon itself and the full swath of hadrosaurs (think Edmontosaurus and Parasaurolophus). And, as Werning points out, hadrosaurs and the closer kin of Iguanodon grew extremely rapidly. These dinosaurs grew faster than Tenontosaurus and sustained the high growth rates until their skeletons were fully developed—there was no extended period of slow growth as the dinosaurs approached skeletal maturity.

This different pattern might explain why dinosaurs like Edmontosaurus were so much bigger than their archaic cousins. A really big, mature Edmontosaurus could reach more than 40 feet in length, but Tenontosaurus topped out at around 25 feet. Perhaps the rapid, sustained growth rate of the hadrosaurs and their close kin allowed them to attain huge sizes, while the more variable growth rates of Tenontosaurus constrained the dinosaur’s size to the middle range.

As paleontologists study other dinosaurs, perhaps the details of how iguanodontian growth rates shifted will become clearer. And Werning has set an excellent precedent for other researchers delving into dinosaur histology. Not only is her paper open-access, but Werning also uploaded multiple high-resolution images of the Tenontosaurus bone slides to the website MorphoBank. Other scientists can readily download the images and investigate the slides for themselves. I hope the Tenontosaurus images are just the start of what will become on online library of dinosaur histology—a resource that will undoubtedly help researchers further investigate the biology of these amazing animals.

References:

Werning, S. (2012). The Ontogenetic Osteohistology of Tenontosaurus tilletti PLoS ONE, 7 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033539

A restoration of the ankylosaur Sauropelta by John Conway. From Wikipedia.

Many dinosaurs were adorned with spikes, horns and plates, but it was the ankylosaurs that took armor to the extreme. These dinosaurs were covered in bony armor from snout to tail-tip, yet, as a new study suggests, there may have been more to some of these structures than just attack and defense.

As reviewed by paleontologists Shoji Hayashi, Kenneth Carpenter, Torsten Scheyer, Mahito Watabe and Daisuke Suzuki in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, the ankylosaurs can be subdivided into three smaller groups. There was the Polacanthidae (a group with large shoulder spikes and a “shield” over the hips), the Nodosauridae (forms with narrow heads and lacking tail-clubs) and the Ankylosauridae (the classic type with heavy armor over the body and tail-clubs). (There is some debate as to whether the Polacanthidae should be thought of as a distinct group, but since the authors separate it from the others I will follow their lead here.) Members of each group can be distinguished from each other on the basis of features which can be seen with the naked eye, but they are also different at the microscopic level. The arrangement of collagen fibers—one of the chief components of bone—differs in each group, as does the thickness of the bone composing the armor.

The differences in the bony armor of each kind of ankylosaur may help paleontologists determine to which group a specimen belongs based upon fragmentary material, but they may also indicate the different ways in which ankylosaurs used their armor. When the scientists looked at pieces of armor (including spikes and clubs) from several different dinosaurs across the three groups, they found that some of what might be thought to be weaponry was not well suited to the task. The outer layer of bone in the spikes of the polacanthids, for example, was relatively thin, especially in comparison to similar structures from the skeletons of the nodosaurids. This may mean that while the large spikes on the nodosaurids were sturdy enough to be used as weapons, the more fragile spikes of the polacanthids may have played a role primarily in display or regulating body temperature instead.

Additionally, the partial ankylosaurid tail club the researchers examined still showed signs of bone growth even though it appeared to have come from an adult animal. Combined with other recent findings, such as a possible lack of tail clubs among some juvenile ankylosaurids, this may mean that this structure developed later in life and was not initially used as a weapon. Perhaps, the authors hypothesize, developing tail clubs were used by juveniles and young adults for display, but it was not until later that the clubs could also be used for defense. Whatever they were doing, this study confirms that scientists are still learning much about dinosaurs by looking inside their bones.

Hayashi, S. (2010). Function and evolution of ankylosaur dermal armor Acta Palaeontologica Polonica DOI: 10.4202/app.2009.0103