Cretaceous creatures discovered this week

We want to give you a flavour of just how busy a time it is for people trying to keep pace with palaeontology at the moment. Researchers around the world are, on average, naming a new type of dinosaur each week! We’ve decided to spotlight two studies published just in the past few days with the scientists involved. While finding new species is always exciting, scientists are also interested in further illuminating the history of the animals we already know existed.  James Tytko with this…

James - Paleontology is booming. An offshoot of the public’s demand for dinosaurs - fuelled by Hollywood blockbusters and big budget documentaries - is the ever increasing number of researchers rifling through museum collections to reassess old specimens in a bid to unlock new perspectives on the ecosystems of the past. 

Adele Pentland from Curtin University in Australia, has been doing just that. For the study she’s published this week, she’s been looking at 2 fossils unearthed many years ago…

Adele - So the specimens were discovered in the late 1980s at a site which is now called Dinosaur Cove. Since excavations were conducted, they have uncovered hundreds of fossil specimens from dinosaurs, early mammals, freshwater pleisiosaurs, crocodiles, and some rare pterosaurs.

James - Pterosaurs are exactly what Adele is interested in. These flying reptiles populated the skies at the same time as the dinosaurs were roaming around on land.

Adele - Often people will call them pterodactyls, but calling the entire group pterodactyls is like calling every single dinosaur tyrannosaurus. They are different to dinosaurs. They're not flying dinosaurs and they vary quite a lot. Some have wingspans of 30 centimetres, whereas some of the big ones have wingspans of 10 metres. So some of the smaller ones eat insects, the group that I mainly work on appear to have eaten fish and then some of the big ones may have been scavengers feeding on carrion.

James - Paleontologists are rarely working from a full body specimen in their research are they? Was this the case this time?

Adele - In the paper we describe two bones. They're actually not from the same individual either. One is a partial pelvis and the other is a small wing bone. Based on comparisons with other pterosaurs from around the world, from the partial pelvis, that individual probably had a wing span of at least two metres, whereas the really small wing bone looks like it belonged to an animal with a wingspan just over one metre. And that is the first juvenile pterosaur that we have from Australia. They're approximately 107 million years old.

James - And if that wasn’t enough fossil news for one week, how about something a little bit closer to home…

Neil - Hello, my name's Neil Gostling. I'm a lecturer in evolution and paleobiology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Southampton. Spinosaurs are one of the most exciting, almost definitely one of the most controversial, but one of the most charismatic, I think is a good word, theropods, the carnivorous dinosaurs, that have ever existed. They've got a weird head which is superficially crocodilian, they've got a very elongated face with pointed circular, conical shaped teeth, perfect for grabbing slippery fish. And we know that they were eating fish because there was a specimen, discovered in 1983, called baryonyx, which means heavy claw because they have big old heavy claws as well for hooking. And the fun thing about them, I mean if you want T-Rex and triceratops, large animals everyone knows about, they're North American, but the spinosaurs are European. And the good thing is that we've got quite a few species in Britain as well.

James - James - Like Adele, Neil and his team observed from old specimens that the story of spinosaurs in Britain was not what past palaeontologists might have thought. PHD student Chris Barker made several discoveries from studying fossils stored within the collection of the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery…

Neil - In 2016. We thought spinosaurus living in Britain were baryonyx, that's what it was. Very quickly, Chris identified some unique characters and showed that not only were they different from one another, they weren't baryonyx either. So we went to three species of spinosaurs in Britain. And then, this is really exciting, we found the smallest piece of dinosaur we could possibly have found: a single tooth, but Chris again spent an awful long time analysing it, picking out all of the potential details and analysing those to show that this is also not the baryonyx related group. It is a different animal. We shouldn't, we can't, and we haven't named a new species based on a single tooth, but we've shown that it isn't any of the groups that are alive at the time and that we know about today.

James - So there’s a sample of some of the work that’s just been published in the last week, advancing our understanding of these ancient animals. But running parallel to this golden age of research is the the boom in the price of fossils sold at auction for eye watering sums and going into the hands of private collectors. A swiss auction house sold A Tyrannosaurus skeleton made up of the bones of three different T-Rexes for US$6.1m just last month. I wanted to find out from our scientists how potentially damaging this trade in dinosaur bones is for future work like theirs?

Adele - You may not know, but for a researcher to describe a fossil specimen, as I have done in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, that fossil can't be in a private collection. It has to be in a museum collection because the concern is that that fossil needs to be accessed by everyone. It can't just be in the control of one person and they can't just let their friends study it and not let you know other people who might contradict them not look at it. That's not how science works.

Neil - All of the work that I've been doing has been on publicly owned collections and yeah, we're trying very hard to democratise science and make it available. The paper that came out today about the tooth is freely available and unfortunately, if things go into private collections, no one can do anything with them. No one can see them. And it's a very great shame.