Oldest Evidence of Dinosaurs in Footprints

Oldest Evidence of Dinosaurs in Footprints: Dinosaur Lineage Emerged

Soon After Massive Permian Extinction

The oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage -- fossilized tracks -- is described in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Just one or two million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, an animal smaller than a house cat walked across fine mud in what is now Poland.
This fossilized trackway places the very closest relatives of dinosaurs on Earth about 250 million years ago -- 5 to 9 million years earlier than previously described fossilized skeletal material has indicated. The paper also described the 246-million-year-old Sphingopus footprints, the oldest evidence of a bipedal and large-bodied dinosaur.

"We see the closest dinosaur cousins immediately after the worst mass extinction," says Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student affiliated with the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. "The biggest crisis in the history of life also created one of the greatest opportunities in the history of life by emptying the landscape and making it possible for dinosaurs to evolve."

The new paper analyzes three sets of footprints from three different sites in the Holy Cross Mountains of central Poland. The sites, all quarries within a 25-mile radius of each other, are windows into three ecosystems because they represent different times periods. The Stryczowice trackway is the oldest at 250 million years. The Baranów trackway is the most recent at 246 million years of age while the Wióry trackway is sandwiched in time between the others.

Because footprints are only an imprint of a small part of the skeleton, identification of trackmakers is often tricky. Luckily, dinosaurs have a very distinctive gait, especially when compared to their diapsid relatives (the evolutionary group that includes birds, reptiles, and extinct lineages) like crocodiles and lizards. While lizards and crocodiles have a splayed walking style, dinosaurs place their two feet closer together. The footprints at all three Polish sites show this feature as well as indisputable dinosaur-like features, including three prominent central toes and reduced outer two toes, a parallel alignment of these three digits (a bunched foot), and a straight back edge of footprints, additional evidence of a dinosaur-like simple hinged ankle.

Because all of these features are seen in footprints at the oldest site, Brusatte and colleagues conclude that the Stryczowice prints -- which are only a few centimeters in length -- are the oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage. These dinosaurs, though, are considered "stem dinosaurs," or the immediate relatives of dinosaurs not part of the slightly more derived clade that technically defines dinosaurs. Also, this animal did walk on all four limbs, an abnormal posture for early dinosaurs and their close relatives, although it appears that its forelimbs were already being reduced to more dinosaur-like proportions since the footprints overstep handprints.

The Baranów and Wióry trackways show changes early in the evolutionary history of dinosaurs. Wióry at 248-249 million years ago shows slight diversification in the types of tracks, but all tracks remain quadrupedal. Footprints from Baranów at 246 million years ago, however, may be the earliest evidence of moderately large-bodied and bipedal true dinosaurs. These tracks, which are called Sphingopus, are 15 centimeters long.

"Poland is a new frontier for understanding the earliest evolution of dinosaurs," says Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki of the University of Warsaw and the Polish Academy of Sciences, who led the project and has been excavating footprints from the three sites for nearly a decade. "It used to be that most of the important fossils were from Argentina or the southwestern U.S., but in Poland we have several sites that yield footprints and bones from the oldest dinosaurs and their closest cousins, stretching throughout the entire Triassic Period."

Finally, although the dinosaur group emerged soon after the Permian extinction, dinosaur-like tracks are rare in the footprint assemblages, representing only 2-3 percent of the prints discovered as opposed to 40-50 percent for crocodile-like archosaurs. Dinosaurs became more abundant tens of millions of years later.

"For the first 20-50 million years of dinosaur history, dinosaurs and their closest relatives were living in the shadow of their much more diverse, successful, and abundant crocodile-like cousins," says Brusatte. "The oldest dinosaurs were small and rare."

In addition to Brusatte and Niedźwiedzki, Richard Butler of the Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie in Germany was an author of the paper. Brusatte is also affiliated with Columbia University. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Percy Sladen Fund, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, and the University of Warsaw.

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by American Museum of Natural History, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Journal Reference:
Stephen L. Brusatte, Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki, Richard J. Butler. Footprints pull origin and diversification of dinosaur stem lineage deep into Early Triassic. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2010; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1746

New Fossil Suggests Dinosaurs Not So Fierce After All

A new species of dinosaur discovered in Arizona suggests dinosaurs did not spread throughout the world by overpowering other species, but by taking advantage of a natural catastrophe that wiped out their competitors.
Tim Rowe, professor of paleontology at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, led the effort to describe the new dinosaur along with co-authors Hans-Dieter Sues, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC and Robert R. Reisz, professor and chair of biology at the University of Toronto. The description appears in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Oct. 6.

Sarahsaurus, which lived about 190 million years ago during the Early Jurassic Period, was 14 feet long and weighed about 250 pounds. Sarahsaurus was a sauropodomorph, a small but closely related ancestor to sauropods, the largest land animals in history.

Conventional wisdom says that soon after dinosaurs originated in what is now South America, they rapidly spread out to conquer every corner of the world, so smart and powerful they overwhelmed all the animals in their path. Sarahsaurus challenges that view.

One of the five great mass extinction events in Earth's history happened at the end of the Triassic Period 200 million years ago, wiping out many of the potential competitors to dinosaurs. Evidence from Sarahsaurus and two other early sauropodomorphs suggests that each migrated into North America in separate waves long after the extinction and that no such dinosaurs migrated there before the extinction.

"We used to think of dinosaurs as fierce creatures that outcompeted everyone else," said Rowe. "Now we're starting to see that's not really the case. They were humbler, more opportunistic creatures. They didn't invade the neighborhood. They waited for the residents to leave and when no one was watching, they moved in."

Sarahsaurus had physical traits usually associated with gigantic animals. For example, its thigh bones were long and straight like pillars, yet were not much larger than a human's thigh bones. Sarahsaurus shows that sauropodmorphs started out small and later evolved to a very large size.

"And so it's starting to look like some of our ideas about how size and evolution work are probably in need of revision," said Rowe, "and that some of the features we thought were tied to gigantism and the physics and mechanics of the bones may not be right."

Rowe is also intrigued by the new dinosaur's hands.

"We've never found anything like this in western North America," he said. "Its hand is smaller than my hand, but if you line the base of the thumbs up, this small hand is much more powerfully built than my hand and it has these big claws. It's a very strange animal. It's doing something with its hands that involved great strength and power, but we don't know what."

Sarahsaurus is named in honor of Sarah (Mrs. Ernest) Butler, an Austin philanthropist and long time supporter of the arts and sciences. Butler chaired a fundraising committee for the Dino Pit, an interactive exhibit Rowe helped create at the Austin Nature and Science Center that encourages children to dig up their own fossil replicas. The Dino Pit had been talked about for 20 years, but fundraising efforts stalled until Butler became chair.

"I told her if she really raised a million dollars to build the Dino Pit, I'd name a dinosaur after her," he said.

A team of researchers and students led by Rowe discovered Sarahsaurus on a field trip in Arizona in 1997. To reach publication, the team had to obtain excavation permits, excavate the site over three years, remove each fossil fragment from surrounding rock, measure and analyze each piece, and CT scan pieces to study internal structures.

"It took me 13 years, but I'm delighted by the great success of the Dino Pit, which hundreds of thousands of kids have now visited. And also that we had the luck to make a find of suitable importance to carry Sarah's name."

This research was funded in part by an Assembling the Tree of Life grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF AToL 0531767).
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin.

Journal Reference:
Timothy B. Rowe, Hans-Dieter Sues, Robert R. Reisz. Dispersal and diversity in the earliest North American sauropodomorph dinosaurs, with a description of a new taxon. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1867