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An international team of scientists led by the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa has built detailed 3D models of the skulls of some of the world’s oldest known dinosaur embryos using the particle accelerator of the European Synchrotron Radiation Center (ESRF) in Grenoble, France.
Embryos were first found in Golden Gate Highlands National Park, Free State Province, South Africa, in 1976 and belong to Massospondylus carinatus, a five-meter-long herbivore that nested in the Free State region about 200 million years ago. Due to their small size and extremely fragile nature, embryos are particularly difficult to study using conventional methods.
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To overcome these problems, postdoctoral research author Kimi Chapelle and Professor Jonah Choiniere of the University of the Witwatersrand brought the embryos to ESRF.
ESRF is an 844-meter-long circular particle accelerator that can accelerate electrons to close to the speed of light to produce high-powered X-ray beams that can be used to non-destructively scan matter in minute detail.
The scans produced were so detailed that the individual bone cells were visible. The data set produced was so vast that it took the team almost three years to process it and convert it into a finely detailed 3D model.
“No laboratory CT scanner in the world can generate this type of data,” said Vincent Fernández, one of the co-authors and a scientist at the Natural History Museum in London (UK).
“Only with a huge facility like the ESRF can we unlock the hidden potential of our most exciting fossils. This research is a great example of a global collaboration between Europe and the South African National Research Foundation. “
Studying the data, Chapelle noted several similarities to the developing embryos of the living relatives of the dinosaurs: crocodiles, chickens, turtles, and lizards.
Each embryo had two types of teeth preserved in its developing jaws. The first was a set of very simple triangular teeth that the embryo would have detached or reabsorbed prior to hatching, just as geckos and crocodiles do today.
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The second set was very similar to that of the adults. Massospondylus carinatus, and they would be the ones with which the embryos were born. This indicates that dinosaurs developed in the egg just like their reptilian relatives, whose embryonic development pattern has not changed in 200 million years.
“It is incredible that in more than 250 million years of reptile evolution, the way the skull develops in the egg remains more or less the same,” said Professor Choiniere. “It’s going to show, don’t mess with something good!”
What was the first dinosaur?
Asked by: Adam King, Huddersfield
As paleontologists discover more fossils worldwide, we continue to find new dinosaurs from the Triassic period – the first interval in dinosaur history.
Currently, the oldest known dinosaurs come from Argentina, and are approximately 231 million years old. There are several dinosaurs of this age found together, including the horse-sized carnivore. Herrerasaurus, the carnivore the size of a dog Eodromaeus (a distant relative of Tyrant saurian Rex), and several dog-sized cousins to bears of giant long-necked sauropods, including Panphagia and Eoraptor.
The fact that so many dinosaurs, with different diets and sizes, lived at this time tells us that dinosaurs were already diversifying shortly after evolving from other reptiles. But none of these dinosaurs were giants, and none were at the top of the food chain. Those species would come later, during the Jurassic Period.
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