Asilisaurus kongwe
Asilisaurus kongwe (foreground). Image by M.H. Donnelly, Field Museum
From the Ruhuhu Basin Research Asilisaurus Page
No time to treat this with more than a passing mention, but a letter in today’s Nature presents a new, Middle Triassic silesaurid from Tanzania named Asilisaurus kongwe (“ancient ancestor lizard”). This adds another continent to the known range of the silesaurids, a group of plant-eating proto-dinosaurs previously found in Europe, South America and North America. It also extends the age of this group back 10 million years, which makes it not only the oldest-known silesaurid, but the oldest known reptile on the bird side of the bird-crocodile split.
Neat stuff, and particularly interesting after looking at Eucoelophysis…
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—Matt Celeskey.
File under: Dinosaurs, Recent Discoveries, Reptiles, Triassic.
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Fossilized Function and Behavior
The big paleo news this week is the description of an 11 foot (3.5 meter) Cretaceous snake, Sanajeh indicus, found coiled around a dinosaur nest—apparently lying in wait for when the hard-to-swallow eggs revealed their bite-sized contents. The paper is freely accessible at PLoS Biology, and microecos and SV-POW both have worthy takes on the topic.
Less-well publicized but just as interesting is the PLoS Biology’s “primer” article on Studying Function and Behavior in the Fossil Record by Michael Benton. It provides an overview of three lines of evidence that can lead to testable hypotheses about ancient behavior: empirical evidence, comparison with modern animals, and biomechanical modeling. For each of these approaches, examples are pulled from paleontological (mostly dinosaur) research over the past decade. There is, I suspect, a lot more that could be said on the topic of inferring behavior from fossils, but this brief is a useful companion piece to the Sanajeh paper and I’d certainly recommend taking a look at it.
In other news of fossilized behavior, my posting will be a bit petrified this week as I push forward on another project—more Coelophysis posts are in the works, however, and I should have one or more to put up next week…
—Matt Celeskey.
File under: Dinosaurs.
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