Native Texas dinosaur had a great nose for survival
This 100 million-year-old ‘Texan’ depended upon its nose to keep from becoming prey
New research shows that a dinosaur that lived in Texas almost 100 million years ago depended on a keen sense of smell for survival as it lacked the club tail wielded by its ancestor.
The first-ever CT scan of Pawpawsaurus campbelli’s — a close cousin of the club-tailed and more well-known Ankylosaurus — revealed the dinosaur had an enlarged nasal cavity that likely allowed it to bellow out a lower range of vocalizations, improved its sense of small and cooled the inflow of air to regulate the temperature of blood flowing into the brain.
From the scans, paleontologists digitally reconstructed the Pawpawsaurus’s brain and the inner ear using special computer software.
“CT imaging has allowed us to delve into the intricacies of the brain of extinct animals, especially dinosaurs, to unlock secrets of their ways of life,” said Louis Jacobs, a Southern Methodist University paleontologist and co-author of the recently published analysis.
“Pawpawsaurus in particular, and the group in belonged to — Nodosauridae — had no flocculus, a structure in the brain involved with motor skills, no club tail, and reduced nasal cavity and portion of the inner ear when compared to the other family of ankylosaurs,” said Ariana Paulina Carabajal, an Argentine scientist involved in the research. “But its sense of smell was very important, as it probably relied on that to look for food, find mates and avoid or flee predators.”
The Pawpawsaurus skull was first discovered 24 years ago by 19-year-old Cameron Campbell in the PawPaw Formation of Tarrant County. Scientists analyzed the skull at that time, but have only recently explored it by using a CT scan, which allows them to see inside the fossil using X-rays.
Unlike the Ankylosaurus, the Pawpawsaurus lacked the football-sized club on its tail used to fight off predators and its smell was inferior compared with its armored descendant.
Still, the Pawpawsaurus’s sense of smell was better than most carniverous dinosaurs.
“We don’t know if their sense of smell also evolved an improved even more,” Jacobs said. “But we do suspect that scenting the environment was useful for a creature’s survival, and the sense of smell is fairly widely distributed among plant eaters and meat eaters alike.”