Episode 403: A scientifically accurate graphic novel featuring Europasaurus. Joschua & Oliver share how they told the story of a dwarf sauropod living on an island in a 184 page graphic novel.

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Interview:

Interview with Oliver Wings and Joschua Knüppe. Joschua is a paleoartist, and host of Paleostream on Twitch. Oliver is the curator of the Geosciences Collections & the Geiseltal Collection at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. The two of them created the graphic novel “Europasaurus: Life on Jurassic Islands”. You can find Joschua on twitter, YouTube, Discord, Deviant Art, or facebook, and Oliver on YouTube (including timelapses of quarry work) or Research Gate. You can also get their book here.

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The dinosaur of the day: Spinops

• Centrosaurine ceratopsian that lived in the Late Cretaceous in what is now Alberta, Canada (Oldman Formation or Dinosaur Park Formation–not the best records of where it was found)
• Looks like other ceratopsians, walked on all fours, had a frill with horns on the frill, and had brow horns and a beak and a nasal horn
• Similar to Styracosaurus and Centrosaurus, and had large nasal horn, small brow horns, and frill ornamentation
• Lots of fossils found of Styracosaurus and Centrosaurus (growth series), so it’s clear Spinops is unique
• Had a bony neck frill
• Had two large spikes that stuck out the back of the frill and two forward curving hooks near the middle of the frill
• Had a spiny appearance on the skulls
• Herbivorous
• Weighed about two tons
• Type species is Spinops sternbergorum
• Charles Sternberg and his son Levi found the first fossils, two partial skulls in 1916 near Red Deer River, and sent them to the Natural History Museum in London (paid for their expedition)
• Holotype includes a partial skull bone
• Also two referred specimens, that include limb fragments and parts of the skull
• Parts of the nasal horn, eye sockets, and small brow horns found
• None of the specimens were found articulated, but they were all found near each other in the same bone bed
• Described in 2011 by Andrew Farke and others
• Genus name means “spine face”
• Genus refers to the unique ornamentation on its face
• Species name is in honor of Charles and Levi Sternberg
• Fossils were considered to be too fragmentary when they were found, so they weren’t prepared and put on display
• Arthur Smith Woodward wrote to Charles Sternberg and said the fossils were “nothing but rubbish”
• Farke said he first saw the specimen in 2004, when he was in the U.K. for the filming of “The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs”
• The frill grabbed his attention, and he told Michael Ryan about it (who had tried to find the specimen in the Natural History Museum collections a few years back but didn’t see it. Phil Currie had taken a photo of it in the 1980s)
• Based on letters between Charles Sternberg and staff at the Natural History Museum, the bonebed where the fossils were found was dense
• Work is being done to relocate where the fossils were found, based on documentation and fossil pollen from the rock where it was preserved
• Paper describing Spinops ends with questions: “Do the ceratopsians preserved here document anagenesis or cladogenesis? How are the taxa of Alberta related to those from elsewhere? Was Spinops a rare element of the Campanian fauna, or will more remains be recognized?”
• Other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include the ankylosaurs Dyoplosaurus and Euoplocephalus and Platypelta, the nodosaur Edmontonia, ceratopsids Chasmosaurus, Mercuriceratops, hadrosaurs Corythosaurus, Gryposaurus, Parasaurolophus
• Other animals that lived around the same time and place include crocodylians, lizards, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, turtles, fish, and mammals

Fun Fact:

Europasaurus is one of several dwarf dinosaurs that lived on the islands that eventually formed Europe

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