Fossilised dino skull reveals adorable appearance of baby sauropods
The first 3D scan of a sauropod embryo’s skull has revealed what these gigantic dinosaurs looked like as tiny hatchlings.
Sauropods are a group of dinosaurs that are instantly recognisable by their small heads and their long, sweeping necks and tails – Diplodocus and Brontosaurus are two of the best-known examples.
The first sauropod embryos were discovered around 25 years ago in an 80-million-year-old nesting ground of titanosaurs (a group of especially large sauropods) at a site called Auca Mahuevo in the Patagonian region of Argentina.
The newly analysed skull also belongs to a titanosaur from Patagonia, although the researchers don’t know the exact location, as the fossilised egg it was found in was originally smuggled out of the country, and only came to the researchers’ attention later on.
The team used an X-ray imaging technology called synchrotron microtomography to analyse the inner structure of the skull’s bones, teeth and soft tissue. This uncovered hidden details, including tiny teeth preserved deeply in the jaw sockets, and even what appear to be the remains of chewing muscles.
The position of the embryo’s eye sockets also suggests that, unlike adults, the freshly hatched sauropods may have had a form of binocular vision, in which the slightly different images from each eye give an improved perception of depth – perhaps helping it to better detect predators. The embryo also has an unusual horn-like structure at the tip of its face, which isn’t present in adults.
“Our study revealed several new aspects about the embryonic life of the largest herbivorous dinosaurs that lived on our planet,” said study leader Dr Martin -undrát, a palaeobiologist at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Slovakia. “A horned faced and binocular vision are features quite different from what we expected in titanosaurian dinosaurs.”