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Imagine a group of toddlers and young hungry kids with unlimited access to the kitchen. Would they gorge on candy, chips and ice cream?
For a type of fast growing young person who lived 150 million years ago, the solution was rather a varied and nutritious diet, rich in tender vegetables.
This discovery results from the discovery, announced Thursday, of a rare juvenile dinosaur skull belonging to one of these familiar, long-necked phytophages, called sauropods. Unlike adults of this particular species, called Diplodocus, the young dinosaur had two types of teeth: pencil-like teeth at the front and flatter and more spatular chompers at the back.
Dino 's tooth diversity and narrow snout allowed him to both select the most desirable shoots and chew them in order to extract as much nutrients as possible, said the senior author of the dino. study, D. Cary Woodruff, Ph.D. student at the Royal Ontario Museum and at the University of Toronto.
A good diet would have been essential to promote the rapid growth of animals, which were born from an egg of the size of a cantaloupe and have a length of 20 meters in adolescence, did he declares.
"We think of it as a mouth with a Swiss army knife," Woodruff said.
Adults, on the other hand, had only the pencil-shaped anterior teeth, arranged in a wider, void-shaped snout, suggesting that they picked the vegetation indiscriminately and swallowed it without chewing, Woodruff said. , who collaborated with researchers at Princeton University. Cincinnati Museum Center, among other institutions. And given their different diets, adult and juvenile sauropods probably ate separately from each other, Woodruff and his coauthors wrote in the newspaper. Scientific reports.
Peter Dodson, a prominent dinosaur expert from the University of Pennsylvania who did not participate in the research, said the skull was an important discovery. He agreed that both types of teeth of the young dinosaur would have allowed the animal to feed, associated with a narrow snout for the selective extraction of the most tender and easily digestible plants.
Good thing, because if young sauropods had relied on their 100-foot-long parents, they would have been at risk, said Dodson, a professor at Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine, as well as his Department of Earth Sciences and the Environment. .
"It seems like a fair enough bet that there is no parental care," he said. "They could have been trampled without the parent knowing it."
Dinosaur hunters get angry when they discover a sauropod skull, because the bones of the heads of these massive animals were delicate and often did not survive the ravages of time. As a result, many museum skeletons of Diplodocus and other sauropods are supplemented by a melting of the skull of a different dinosaur, sometimes even of the same species.
The skull analyzed Woodruff – found in a Montana quarry by co-author of the study, Glenn Storrs, of the Cincinnati Museum Center – is particularly unusual in its completeness and the fact that it comes from the world. such a young animal.
Woodruff estimated that the creature was 2 to 4 years old when she died. Even at this tender age, her skull was already 9 inches long, with a body stretching at least 15 feet from head to tail.
Explore further:
The skull of a dinosaur has changed shape during growth
More information:
D. Cary Woodruff et al. The smallest Diplodocid skull reveals cranial ontogeny and growth-related diet changes in the largest dinosaurs Scientific reports (2018). DOI: 10.1038 / s41598-018-32620-x
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