Social animals that lived in herds: it is the unprecedented portrait of some of the first dinosaurs to have populated the Earth, 193 million years ago. This so far little known social life of the first dinosaurs was told by the study, thanks to the high-energy X-rays of the ESRF synchrotron in Grenoble, of the fossils found in Patagonia under the guidance of Diego Pol, of the Argentine paleontological museum Egidio Feruglio, and described in Scientific Reports.
The discovery comes from the discovery of a series of exceptionally well-preserved remains of Mussaurus patagonicus, an ancient species of herbivorous dinosaur with a long neck that reached a maximum length of 5 meters and which were almost certainly the forerunners of the gigantic herbivores of the Jurassic, about 100 millions of years later. Since 2013, over 100 eggs, the size of hens, and the partial skeletons of at least 69 young or very young individuals have emerged from the Laguna Colorada site in Patagonia.
Artistic reconstruction of a group of Mussaurus patagonicus. with specimens of different ages (source: Jorge Gonzalez)
“Using high-energy X-rays it was possible to penetrate the sample without destroying it and obtain a complete view inside it”, said Vincent Fernandez, paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London and former ESRF scientist, data that have allowed to discover many details such as the age of each individual. “We spent 4 days scanning eggs 24 hours a day – explained Fernandez – it was tiring, but the exciting results cheered up”: thanks to the final high resolution images it was even possible to see the embryos of Mussaurus inside the eggs and show that the nests were common breeding sites of the entire group.
Analyzing the arrangement of the remains it was observed that the fossils were somehow grouped by ‘age’: on the one hand dinosaur eggs and young, the young in a nearby place, while the adult remains found alone or in pairs in the whole site. This ‘segregation by age’, the researchers believe, is a clear sign of a complex and herd-like social structure. The dinosaurs probably worked as a community, laying their eggs in a common nesting ground, the young gathered in ‘schools’, while the adults were more mobile. “This could mean that the young people did not follow their parents into some sort of small family structure,” said Jahandar Ramezani, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who participated in the study. “There was instead – he continued – a wider community structure, in which adults shared and took part in the growth of the entire community”.
These early dinosaurs originated in the late Triassic, just before an extinction event wiped out many other animals, and living in packs may have given the Mussaurus an edge in withstanding adverse conditions. Similar findings, from which clues to possible social behaviors emerge, had already been made in other sites but with inaccurate dating and fewer fossils. With this new discovery we have “now documented this early social behavior in dinosaurs,” Ramezani added. “A new element that now prompts us to ask ourselves whether living in a herd may have played an important role in the evolutionary success of the dinosaurs.”
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Source From: Ansa
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