Episode 263 is all about Neovenator, an apex predator from the UK with a sensitive face.
We also interview Jo Pegler and Corey Richards, laboratory coordinator and operations & marketing coordinator at the Eromanga Natural History Museum in southwest Queensland Australia. If you can’t visit them in person, you can see there work at enhm.com.au or on twitter @EromangaNHM
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In this episode, we discuss:
News:
- A new Miragaia specimen solidifies the genus, but eliminates Alcovasaurus source
- A rare three-dimensionally preserved dinosaur/bird, Fukuipteryx, was described from Japan source
- The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History just assessed their iconic mural “The Age of Reptiles” source
- The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade had a T. rex float named Rexy source
- The American Museum of Natural History decorated a tree with more than 800 origami dinosaurs source
The dinosaur of the day: Neovenator
- Allosauroid that lived in the Early Cretaceous in what is now the Isle of Wight, in the UK
- Estimated to be about 25 ft (7.6 m) long
- Weighed about 2,200 to 4,400 lb (1,000 to 2,000 kg)
- Had a gracile build
- Probably an apex predator
- Had five teeth in the premaxilla
- Had a nostril that was twice as long as high
- Other theropods also had large nostrils
- May have had a “sensitive face”, as described by Chris Barker and others in 2017
- Had a complex system of neurovascular canals, which worked like sensory organs (similar trait to Spinosauridae, though it probably didn’t look for prey in the water)
- May have used it to be more sensitive to pressure and temperature, to control jaw pressure and for feeding (avoid biting into bone while eating)
- May also have been used for courtship or nurturing its young (like many modern crocodilians)
- Need more analysis to understand the facial sensitivity
- Fossils found in 1978, when a storm caused rocks to fall to the beach on the Isle of Wight
- Those rocks were collected by the Henwood family and then geology student David Richards, who sent them to the Museum of Isle Wight Geology and the British Museum of Natural History, where Alan Jack Charig found the fossils belonged to Iguanodon and some type of theropod
- The Iguanodon was later referred to Mantellisaurus
- In the 1980s the British Museum of Natural History sent a team to collect more bones, and they found another theropod tail vertebra
- Amateur paleontologists started searching too, and lots of fossils found (snout, teeth, part of the lower jaw, most of the vertebral column, ribs, chevrons, hindlimb, etc.), which was about 70% of the skeleton
- More individuals were found
- They were thought to be a new species of Megalosaurus, but Steve Hutt in 1990 suggested it was a different
- In 1996, Hutt, David Martill and Michael Barker named and described the type species Neovenator salerii
- Genus name means “new hunter”
- Species name in honor of the Salero family, who own the site where it was found (too many people had found fossils, so they didn’t want to name just one person as the one who discovered the dinosaur)
- Steve Brusatte, Roger Benson, and Steve Hutt redescribed Neovenator in 2008
- Teeth that look the same as the holotype of Neovenator were found in France in 2014
- Holotype had pathologies (healed fractures, vertebrae fusions, etc.)
- Lived among fish, amphibians, lizards, pterosaurs, and Mantellisaurus
Fun Fact: Herbivores often specialize on specific plants. For example diplodocids definitely couldn’t eat grass. It hadn’t evolved, and their teeth would be pretty useless for biting it.
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