Episode 277 is all about Telmatosaurus, a small island dwelling hadrosaur from what is now Romania.

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In this episode, we discuss:

In this week’s episode:

• We review the 2014 movie Dinosaur Island source
• The webcomic Darbi “The misadventures of a blood-thirsty baby T-Rex.” is free online—parental advisory applies. source
• A cretaceous rib fossil may be from the second largest dinosaur that lived in what is now Japan source
• Spinosaurus: Lost Giant of the Cretaceous and Giants: African Dinosaurs may be coming to a museum near you soon source

The dinosaur of the day: Telmatosaurus

• Hadrosaurid that lived in the Late Cretaceous in what is now Romania
• Pretty small (insular dwarf), about 16 ft (5 m) long and weighed about half a tonne
• Herbivorous
• Maxillary teeth are high and narrow
• Telmatosaurus lived on an island, one of the islands of the European Archipelago
• Hateg Island dinosaurs were insular dwarfs (smaller than other dinosaurs because they didn’t need to eat as much, and could live with limited resources on the island)
• Helped that there weren’t really any large theropods on the island (predators included Balaur, about 6.5 ft or 2 m long)
• Lived among mammals, pterosaurs, amphibians, crocodilians, fish
• Nopsca came up with the idea of island dwarfism
• Best known European hadrosaurid
• Genus name means “marsh lizard”
• First dinosaur named by Franz Nopcsa
• Local peasants brought his sister, Ilona Nopcsa a dinosaur skull in 1895. They found it in Transylvania, near the Nopsca family Sâcel estate
• Holotype is a skull with lower jaws, found in the Hateg Basin, about 68 million years old
• Because of the skull, Franz Nopcsa studied paleontology at the University of Vienna
• Franz named the skull Limnosaurus transsylvanicus in 1899 (name means “swamp lizard” and refers to the idea that hadrosaurs lived in swamps)
• Later, Franz learned that Othniel Charles Marsh had named a crocodyliform Limnosaurus in 1872 (which was later reclassified as Pristichampsus), and in 1903 Franz renamed his dinosaur to Telmatosaurus
• Barnum Brown didn’t know about the new name, and named the genus Hecatasaurus in 1910 (junior objective synonym)
• Franz referred Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus to Orthomerus in 1915 (Orthomerus transsylvanicus), as a third Orthomerus species (genus name means “straight femur”); this was based on similarities in the femora
• Orthomerus is considered to be a nomen dubium as of 2019 (no unique traits based on the lectotype, a right thigh bone). Telmatosaurus was considered its own genus earlier (1980s and 1990s, David Weishampel and others in the 1990 book The Dinosauria)
• If Telmatosaurus and Orthomerus were the same, Telmatosaurus would be a junior synonym (named later). Geologist Eric Mulder forgot this rule and renamed Orthomerus dolloi as Telmatosaurus dolloi in 1984
• Skeletal elements have been found scattered and isolated, as well as the holotype skull and lower jaws, and four articulated cervical vertebrae and three sacral vertebrae with two sacral ribs
• Hatchlings and embryos found with clutches of megaloolithid eggs in the Hateg Basin
• Telmatosaurus eggs may have been found in Livezi and Boi?a in Romania, in the Tara Hategului area (considered to be likely Telmatosaurus by researchers from the University of Bucharest)
• In 2016, Mihai D. Dumbrava and others published about a non-cancerous tumor, amelblastoma, on the lower jaw of a juvenile Telmatosaurus (first discovery of a benign tumor in a dinosaur, before that, had only been known in modern mammals and reptiles)
• The team used Micro-CT scanning on the jawbone
• The tumor on Telmatosaurus shows the hadrosauroids were more prone to tumors than other dinosaurs (Telmatosaurus is the most basal hadrosaurid and was isolated from sister taxon/other hadrosaurids for at least 15 million years, probably because it lived on an island, and the tumor is early in the family’s evolution)
• Possible that the tumor led to the dinosaur’s early death (may not have been painful, but based on modern animals, predators often go after the weak or injured). Hard to say though, since only the two lower jaws were found
• Telmatosaurus fossils now at the Natural History Museum in London

Fun Fact: Alberta has nearly 10 times as many dinosaur finds than all the other provinces and territories combined. According to paleobiodb.org

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