Reptilian dinosaur cousin had battering ram for head

WASHINGTON — In a warm, lush region of West Texas crisscrossed with rivers, a bizarre reptile roamed the Triassic Period landscape about 228 million years ago, boasting a bony domed head unlike almost any creature that ever appeared on Earth.

Scientists on Thursday described the reptile, named Triopticus primus, based on a fossilized partial skull dug up in 1940 near Big Spring, Texas, that had long languished in a drawer in a University of Texas paleontology collection.

Its head resembled a battering ram: dome-shaped and composed of thickened bone.

The only other animals with comparable craniums were dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs that appeared about 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period and were distantly related to Triopticus.

Even the internal structure of Triopticus and pachycephalosaurs skulls was similar.

There has been a long debate among paleontologists about how pachycephalosaurs used their heads, whether for head-butting like bighorn sheep, self-defense or some other purpose. Scientists are similarly uncertain about Triopticus.

“It’s difficult for us to say what the domed morphology would have been for or what would have ‘encouraged’ the evolution of this structure,” said Virginia Tech paleontologist Michelle Stocker, who led the study published in the journal Current Biology.

The appearance of similar characteristics in creatures that are not closely related, like the wings of birds, bats and the extinct flying reptiles called pterosaurs, is called convergent evolution.

“Triopticus is a really interesting example of evolutionary convergence that shows that what we thought were unique body shapes in many dinosaurs actually evolved millions of years before in the Triassic Period,” Stocker said.

The researchers think Triopticus might have been up to 10 feet long but do not know whether it walked on two legs or four or whether it ate plants or meat.

Triopticus lived when the very first dinosaurs were appearing, relatively small ones overshadowed by a diverse collection of non-dinosaur reptiles. Living in Texas alongside Triopticus were large, semi-aquatic croc cousins called phytosaurs, big four-legged meat-eaters called rauisuchians and four-legged armored plant-eaters called aetosaurs.

Some of these also resembled dinosaurs that appeared much later.

University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Katharine Criswell said, “It is amazing to think that many of the iconic dinosaur features that we know and love, such as long snouts, toothless beaks, armor plates and thickened dome skulls, were arrived at completely independently up to 100 million years earlier in these distant reptilian cousins.”

MARBLE HALL, South Africa — Almost 40 years after the first human testtube baby was born, South African scientists have produced something bulkier: the first Cape buffalo brought into the world by in vitro fertilization.

Pumelelo the buffalo bull calf was born on June 28 and was unveiled to the world recently at a game farm north of Johannesburg in South Africa’s Limpopo province.

The technique holds hope for far bigger and more endangered species such as the northern white rhino: Only three of them are left on the planet.

“This success is of major importance for the prospective breeding of endangered species, and that is the reason why we are undertaking this work,” said Morne de la Rey, a veterinarian and the managing director of Embryo Plus, which specializes in bovine embryo transfers and semen collection, mostly for the cattle industry.

Proud parents are biological mother and egg donor Vasti and sperm donor Goliat, which is Afrikaans for Goliath — in his bulky case, no misnomer. The baby bull has a surrogate mother, which has taken to him.

He could grow to 2,200 pounds or more.

Cape buffalos are notoriously bad-tempered and dangerous animals and Vasti was sedated when her oocytes, or egg cells, were extracted using a technique similar to that used on human donors.

Game farming is big business in South Africam, but those involved in the project said the main concern was conservation.

“The object is certainly not to reproduce buffalo of superior genetics. … The goal is the conservation of species,” said Frans Stapelberg, the owner of the farm where Pumelelo was born.

The project will focus on the northern white rhino and the trio who remain on the planet on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. The San Diego Zoo is partnering with that effort.

There are around 18,000 to 20,000 southern white rhinos left, mostly in South Africa, but they are being relentlessly poached for their horns to feed illicit demand in Asian countries such as Vietnam, where they are a prized ingredient in traditional medicine.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, there are around 900,000 Cape buffalo, also called African buffalo, on the continent, but they are now mostly confined to protected areas.