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Imagine a crew of hungry toddlers and kindergartners with unrestricted access to the kitchen. Would they gorge themselves on candy, chips and ice cream?
For a type of fast-growing youngster that lived 150 million years ago, the answer was a diverse, nutritious diet, rich in tender greens.
That finding of the discovery, announced Thursday, of a rare juvenile dinosaur skull belonging to one of those familiar, long-necked plant-eaters called sauropods. This paper is one of a number of different types of teeth – pencil-like teeth in the forehead, and flatter, spatulalike chompers in the back.
The Cary Woodruff, Ph.D. student at the Royal Ontario Museum and the University The Dino's dental diversity and narrow snout allowed him to pick out the choicest shoots and chew them to get as many nutrients as possible of Toronto.
Proper nutrition would have been essential to fuel fast growing for the animals, which would have been teenagers, he said.
"We're thinking of a Swiss Army knife," Woodruff said.
Adults, on the other hand, had only the pencil-like front teeth, set in a wider, vacuum-shaped snout, they were indiscriminately indented and swallowed it without chewing, said Woodruff, who collaborated with researchers from Princeton University and Cincinnati Museum Center, among other institutions. And given their di erent diets, he is one of the authors of the report, Woodruff and his coauthors wrote in the journal Scientific Reports.
Peter Dodson, prominent University of Pennsylvania expert dinosaur who was not involved with the research, said the skull was an important find. He agreed that the young dinosaur's two kinds of teeth would have enabled the animal to feed itself – coupled with a narrow snout for selective extraction of the most tender, easy-to-digest plants.
Good thing, because they have had massive relapses, they would have been in danger, said Dodson, a professor in Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine and its department of earth and environmental science. .
"It seems like a pretty fair bet that there was not parental care," he said. "They could've been stepped on without the parent knowing it."
Dinosaur-hunters get excited when they find a sauropod skull, as the bones of the heads of these massive massive animals were delicate and often did not survive the ravages of time. As a result, many skeletons of Diplodocus and other sauropods are completed with a skull of a different dinosaur – sometimes not even the same species.
The skull Woodruff analyzed by Glenn Storrs from the Cincinnati Museum Center – is especially unusual for its completeness and the fact that it came from such a young animal.
Woodruff estimated that the creature was 2 to 4 years old when it died. Even at this age, its skull was already 9 inches long, with a body stretching at least 15 feet from head to tail.
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© 2018 The Philadelphia Inquirer
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PHOTO (for help with images, contact 312-222-4194): SCI-DINOSAUR-TEETH
Copyright 2018 Tribune Content Agency.
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