A fossil that sat untouched for decades is now helping rewrite part of the dinosaur family tree, and the breakthrough is happening at Virginia Tech.There's more in 10 News interview: Simba Srivastava, Virginia Tech student who identified new dinosaur from WSLS.
What may look like crushed rock is actually a fossil, one that scientists painstakingly rebuilt piece by piece into one of the earliest meat-eating dinosaurs ever identified.
Earlier this year, Srivastava identified the fossil of a meat-eating dinosaur that is thought to be three times older than the T. rex, the only one of its kind that anyone has ever found.That explains the "murder muppet" nickname.
We spoke to Srivastava about his discovery.
Now for the press release: Student identifies new meat-eating dinosaur three times older than T. rex By Kelly Izlar.
A fossil skull provides new clues about how dinosaurs ascended to their full Jurassic power.I can relate to Simba Srivastava. I've mentioned several times that I studied the fossil mollusks of the tar pits (Rancho La Brea) in Los Angeles. Those specimens sat in drawers at the George C. Page Museum (La Brea Tar Pits) for nearly a decade before I read about them in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology and saw an opportunity, which I seized. I approached my advisor, who told me there would be a talk about the invertebrate fossils at the tar pits the next week. I attended the talk, spoke to the collections manager afterwards, and got a tour of the working area of the museum. I felt like a kid in a candy store; I'd wanted to be there ever since the museum opened. I then met with the assistant curator and began work within the month. I ended up working there for four years, becoming Student-In-Residence before completing my M.S. thesis and moving to Michigan. While I was there, I realized that there was a century of research waiting with the specimens already in the collection. That's true of every major research museum; there are hundreds, if not thousands, of discoveries waiting to be found sitting in drawers and on shelves. Srivastava and his advisor/co-author Sterling J. Nesbitt made one of them.
“You want to stick your finger in a dinosaur brain?” asked Simba Srivastava.
Surrounded by cabinets full of ancient bones in the paleobiology lab, the Virginia Tech undergraduate student held out a lumpy, pockmarked fossil.
“This is a uniquely sucky specimen,” said Srivastava. “It's so bad. Like, if you saw a human skull in this way, you'd throw up.”
Nevertheless, the senior geosciences major spent two years unscrambling the ancient creature and determining its place in the story of evolution. His findings, which were published April 15 in Papers in Palaeontology, shed light on how dinosaurs dominated the Jurassic period.
This is the type of work a long-tenured curator or a late-stage professor would do, but geobiologists Sterling Nesbitt and Michelle Stocker tapped Srivastava when he was a first-year student.
“We want undergraduate researchers to experience the whole paleontological research process at Virginia Tech,” said Nesbitt. “Simba grabbed the project by the reins.”
Dino domination
The mangled skull was uncovered twice: In 1982, a crew from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History unearthed it from New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch. Thirty-some years later, Nesbitt dug it out of a drawer and eventually brought it back to Blacksburg. Using computed tomography scanning data, Srivastava isolated the specimen digitally and 3D printed a reconstruction.
The skull belonged to a species of meat-eating dinosaur that’s more than three times as old as Tyrannosaurus Rex (sic).
These creatures lived at the end of the Triassic period, which is about 252 million to 201 million years ago. Back then, dinosaurs weren’t the all-powerful apex predators portrayed by Hollywood. They were vying for resources against the forerunners of crocodiles and mammals.
But that all changed drastically when an extinction seemingly wiped out most of the competition. With that, the Triassic ended, and dinosaurs came into their power.
“Dinosaurs go from being co-stars to the headliner,” Srivastava said.
Clues about how dinosaurs evolved and spread in the succeeding Jurassic period lie buried in the rocks, but well-preserved fossils from the end of the Triassic are rare.
In fact, Srivastava’s squished specimen is the only one of its kind anyone has found so far.
The skull shows that the species had massive cheekbones, a wide braincase, and probably a short, deep snout. It was the first time these characteristics had been seen in early dinosaurs, indicating that they were constantly evolving, according to the study.
Murder muppet’s last stand
The name Srivastava picked for the new species reflects its bizarre proportions and unfortunate condition.
“We landed on Ptychotherates bucculentus, which means ‘folded hunter with full cheeks’ in Latin,” said Srivastava. “One paleo-artist said that it looked like a murder muppet.”
After two years of deep research, the Virginia Tech team was able to determine that the skull belonged to one of the last surviving members of one of the earliest-evolving families of carnivorous dinosaurs called Herrerasauria.
Thanks to this fossil, the group made another, somewhat surprising discovery.
Ptychotherates was found in rocks that may date to right before the great extinction at the end of the Triassic period — and no other members of their family was ever seen again, possibly suggesting that this dinosaur group went extinct as a result of that mass extinction.
“This forces us to reconsider the impact of the end-Triassic extinction as something that wiped out not just the competitors to dinosaurs, but some long-standing dinosaur lineages themselves,” Srivastava said.
And finally, because no herrerasaurians have been found anywhere else this late in the Triassic, the area that is today the American Southwest may have been where they survived the longest and made their last stand.
Srivastava’s folded hunter is their only spokesperson.
“This specimen, it fits in my hands, but it is the only proof that any of these dinosaurs lived this long, lived in these latitudes, the only proof that they evolved to have this skull shape,” said Srivastava. “All these billions of individuals that existed through time are spoken for by this one specimen.”
By the way, not only did Srivastava and Nesbitt describe and name a new genus and species, they proposed a new clade of dinosaurs, Morphoraptora within Herrerasauria, which is already in the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia has had its issues, but rapid and accurate reporting of scientific discoveries is not one of them.
One of last year's top posts is about science and technology at Virginia Tech, so follow over the jump for a brief retrospective about it.
