A New Ankylosaur with a Beautiful Club!
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This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College. Join them for two weeks digging up dinosaur bones from the Jurassic period in northwest Colorado this summer. For details, go to cncc.edu slash dino dig.

Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 530th episode, we're back. Yes.

We had our baby. We did. We did it. We did. Yes. Getting slowly back into the groove with a lot less sleep. Yes, definitely less sleep. But now we have two little cuties at our house, which is very nice.

Although sleep-depriving. But while we were gone, there have been a ton of new dinosaurs. At least 20. So many. And that, I think you said, worked out to about one a week, which is what we often say as our shorthand for how many new dinosaurs are being named. For this episode, though, we're going to focus on ankylosaurs.

I figured we did a Brontosaurus is best episode pretty recently. So throw you a bone, Garrett. Oh, thanks.

And I think you also have an update on the really expensive Stegosaurus that got sold. Oh, yes. Keeping it in the Thyreophoran family. Stegosaurs, Ankylosaurs. Yeah. They're cousins. They are. Pretty close. We also have Dinosaur of the Day, Pawpawsaurus. Yes, an armored Ankylosaur. Nice. And a fun fact, which is that there's an animal named Dinosaurus.

But it's not a dinosaur. What? Yeah, it's confusing, but I will explain. And we also have our Dino Duels competition kicking off this week. Oh yeah, I filled out my bracket. Oh good. I want to compare with you, see who wins between the two of us. But before we get into all of that, as always, we'd like to thank some of our patrons. We could not do this show without you. And of course, with our growing family, we really appreciate all of our new patrons and

We have one longtime patron that we need to shout out, and that's Dino Mimi. Thank you so much for all of your support over the years. We really appreciate it.

And then we have nine new patrons to thank. We're going to be catching up for a little bit. I think we have about 50 total new patrons, but we did a survey a while ago and decided to cap it to 10 per episode. So it's going to take us a couple of weeks to get through all these new patrons. Thank you so much. But this week we have nine and they are Doyne, Maggie, Mark,

Sandra, Rachel, a Potato-saurus, Simon, Kraken, and Jillian. So thank you all so much for joining our Patreon. We really appreciate it. We couldn't do it without you. And hopefully you're enjoying all of the perks.

Yes, thank you so much. As Garrett mentioned, we're a growing family. Babies are expensive, it turns out. They are. We appreciate all of your support, but not just monetary support. We also love our community. So thank you to all the Dino-it-alls. Yes. And speaking of Dino-it-alls, we have our first round of Dino-duels starting up and

And we have all eight of the matchups live on our Patreon. As we speak, Patreon is the best way we could come up with to avoid duplicate votes because it has a built-in polling mechanism and a lot of the people who would vote are already there, so we figured that was an easy way to do it. But the...

Polls are available to all patrons, including the free level. It's really just a way for us to make sure that there aren't duplicates happening because it'd be pretty tedious to set up a whole bunch of free Patreon profiles to do multiple votes and don't do that. But if you want to vote, just go to patreon.com slash I know dino and you will see all of the polls there.

The voting is only open until March 14th for these eight polls because we have to get the results in and then get the next episode ready since we're going back to weekly for at least a while. So get your votes in as soon as possible. If you want the complete rules for the Dino Duels competition, they are at bit.ly slash Dino Duels rules and good luck to everyone. Hopefully you got your bracket set up. Yes. If you didn't,

You won't be eligible to win our grand prize of six months free Triceratops tier, but I would still recommend filling out a bracket because it's fun to see how you did. Exactly. Bragging rights. Yeah. Bragging rights are really where it's at. That self-affirmation that you know the dinosaur is the best. All right. Jumping into the news, even though there's a new ankylosaur to talk about, I get to go first.

There's an update on the Stegosaurus Apex. So do you remember when that Stegosaurus sold for 44.6 million US dollars? I do. It wasn't that long ago, just a few months.

Well, now it's at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Oh, nice. At least for a little while. Oh. So it's, hey, it's still there. They had a whole big grand opening and yeah, it sounds really cool.

So it's nicknamed Apex, the Stegosaurus. It's almost 27 feet long or a little over eight meters. It's nearly 80% intact. They have 254 bones out of 319. And we last talked about Apex back in episode 506. That was shortly after the sale.

There's skin impressions and neck armor. I love the neck armor of Stegosaurus. Mm-hmm. All the little osteoderms down the bottom. I think that's my favorite part about it. All the plates are pretty cool. And Kylosaurs have that too sometimes, like Datai. Well then.

So Kenneth Griffin, who's the founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, is the one who bought Apex, the stegosaurus, and has loaned it to the AMNH for the next four years. So you've got four years to go see it, for sure. Although, who knows? Maybe it'll end up at another museum. Griffin's also supporting a three-year postdoctoral fellowship, which is meant to figure out Apex's species and study the dinosaur in depth, which is really cool. And AMNH is going to take CT scans and make 3D models, which is very good for future research.

This is interesting to me because we've heard a lot of people at museums talk about how they won't study dinosaurs unless they can confirm that they're going to stay in the public and stay accessible to scientists forever. But it sounds like in this case, you might be bending those rules a little bit.

I think there might be a few things going on. It's that there's more resources to study this dinosaur, which is amazing. And who knows, maybe there's talk about extending the loan or it'll go to some other museums. We don't know. I hope behind the scenes there's some sort of guarantee it's going to stay at a museum, even if it's not at AMNH. But also, I remember reading that there's a lot of information about

Yeah.

In that case, that might not be the case here. Yeah, that's true. But for the repeatability part of science where in the future if someone is like, oh, is this a new species? How does it compare to Apex? If Apex is no longer available to be studied, then that's one of the things people worry about. Right. So hopefully that's not going to happen. Yeah, and the CT scans and 3D models will help with that too. That's true.

That's good news because we were a little worried about where Apex might be. That means we've got four years to get to New York, Garrett. I guess so. I don't know if we're going to make it. We might. We might. Things are different with babies. So now moving on to our new ankylosaur.

Because we know ankylosaurs are the best dinosaurs. That's not what our most recent episode about the best dinosaur said. Speaking of polls on patreon.com slash inodyno, we did a poll for is ankylosaurus or brontosaurus better, and ankylosaurus won in a landslide. Almost two to one. 65% of people said ankylosaurus is better. So...

I think some people missed out on that poll. That's what that tells me. There were 60 votes. Pretty good voter turnout for us. There could have been more. There could have been. There could have been more. I am a little disappointed voters. Well, I mean, the most expensive fossil ever sold was a Thyreophoran. So maybe stegosaurs are actually the best. Fair point. And kylosaurs are like a close second being in the same group together. Oh,

Although, who knows? By the end of our dino duels, we'll have to say differently, right? True. Yeah, there isn't even an ankylosaur in contention. Why did we do that? Nor is Stegosaurus. Yeah, we were doing something special. So this new ankylosaur was published in Historical Biology, and the lead author is Ziheng Zhu, among many others, including Xing Xu, who's on many of the papers that come out of China. Yeah.

Traditionally, ankylosaurs are split into notosaurids and ankylosaurids. I say traditionally because there have been a lot of proposals recently to change that, sometimes drastically, but it still is usually the case in new papers that we're using those two groups. Notosaurids are usually the ones with big shoulder spikes, whereas ankylosaurids have tail clubs.

This one is an ankylosaurid, which they can say with certainty because they found its tail club. Nice. Yeah. A lot of times you have to infer it based on other bones or where it was found or when it was found. But in this case, you got the tail club. It's an ankylosaurid. And it's an impressive tail club, too. But first, I have to say its name so I can stop saying this ankylosaurid.

But this ankylosome is named Hua Sha Zhou Long Shou Wen. And Hua Sha Zhou Long, so Hua Sha is an ancient name for China and Zhou means armor. And lastly, Long means dragon, which is often used for dinosaurs. So the full genus name means ancient armored Chinese dragon. If you put it all together, it's a pretty cool name.

The species name Shouwen, the authors say it quote means painted in the shape of a beast in Chinese, which comes from a cultural relic housed in the Jiangxi Provincial Museum end quote. That's cool.

I don't know how those two words could mean such a long thing, and I couldn't find it in any of my Chinese English dictionaries. So it's probably a shortened version of a phrase is my guess. But that's a really cool meaning. I like that painted in the shape of a beast. It's pretty neat. And what a beast with a tail club. Yeah, it's definitely in the shape of a beast.

In total, Hua Xia Jiao Long would have been about 6 meters or about 20 feet long. The authors classify it as large, although I have to point out that even though it was large compared to most ankylosaurids, Ankylosaurus is still in a class of its own at about 8 to 9 meters or approaching 30 feet long. But maybe that's just like a huge ankylosaur and this is a large ankylosaur.

Even at 20 feet, Hua Sha Jialong would have weighed a few tons. So I think classifying it as large is fair. Most of its unique features are very technical. But one that I enjoy is that if you look at the tail vertebrae from the front, the centrum looks heart-shaped. Oh, a heart-shaped beast. Yeah. Yeah.

Something that heart-shaped vertebrae, or I should say centrum, which is just the middle part of the vertebra, is something that's common with the clubless notosaurids. But this is the first time it's been seen in an ankylosaurid. That's pretty cool. That is.

Huaxia zholong was found in the Longxi village in Jiangxi province in southern China. And the ankylosaur datai was also found in Jiangxi province. So it's not the first ankylosaurid to be found there. Huaxia zholong was found back in 1986. I'm not sure why it took them so long to formally describe it. Maybe it was a little forgotten. Could be.

Datai was found 30 years later than Hua Sha Jialong in 2016, but it still got described first, which I think is pretty funny. I'm partly wondering if finding Datai might have reminded people about Hua Sha Jialong. People are like, oh, there's this club we found from roughly the same area. Maybe we should look at that too. Yeah.

But Dottai was a really cool find. So maybe that's why it got described first. It was our best new ankylosaur last year. And its head was preserved in really great detail with those small osteoderms covering the bottom of its neck, like you were talking about seeing on stegosaurs. We saw those on Dottai. So maybe it warranted being named first, despite being found.

30 years later. Those neck details. It was pretty cool. Interestingly, Hua Sha Zhaolong couldn't be more of the opposite of a find than Datai, whereas Datai had this amazing head and neck in really lifelike posing and all these details, including those tiny little osteoderms.

Huasha Jolong has essentially everything except for the head and neck. Oh. Which is a little bit of a bummer because we often use the skulls of ankylosaurs when you're trying to classify them. I was just going to say. Yeah, so without the skull...

You don't have as much to work with. But when you have all the rest of the bones of the body, there are pieces you can pull out here and there to get some unique details. That explains why there's so many details. Yeah, the technical aspects of it. Yeah. They really do have almost all of the skeleton from the shoulders back, including the arms, legs, ribs, and just a few osteoderms.

But they do have nearly all of the vertebrae, including the handle of the tail club. Nice. Yeah, the tail clubs are always so cool. In this case, the club has seven vertebrae fused together, which sounded like a lot to me. But they mentioned some other ankylosaurs that have varying numbers of tail clubs. And Pinacosaurus has at least 18 fused together. Wow. So maybe seven isn't so impressive.

There are a lot of ossified tendons included in that handle, but weirdly none of them connect the end of the handle to the club itself. Hmm.

Cynically, that made me immediately worry a little bit if the club is an original part of the fossil or if maybe somebody had this amazing handle and then said, "Ooh, there's this club. What if we just put that over here and make it look more impressive?" But I don't know if in the '80s people were doing as much faking of ankylosaurs. It wasn't until Jurassic Park that I think the value of these really shot up, so it's probably less of a concern.

They also mentioned that some ankylosaurids completely lack ossified tendons, and then there's always the possibility that they just weren't preserved. Maybe the most likely. The club itself is pretty symmetric with those characteristic two major osteoderms, one on each side of the tail. In total, the club is about 30 by 30 centimeters or a foot by a foot. It's pretty big.

It's possible that there were other minor osteoderms surrounding the major osteoderms before it fossilized. That's how a lot of the tail clubs look like. For example, on Ankylosaurus, we've got the two big ones, but then there's a few more little ones mixed in in between, sort of filling in that gap that's left by the two more cylindrical osteoderms on the sides, making a more solid mass.

In their phylogenetic analysis, Hua Xia Jialong came out as a sister taxa to Jinyun Pelta, meaning that they are closer related to each other than to anything else. Jinyun Pelta is roughly 20 million years older than Hua Xia Jialong.

They're both from the late Cretaceous, just Jinyun Pelta is very roughly 100 million years old, whereas Huaxia Jolong is more in the territory of 80 million years old. That's nothing. Yeah. For evolutionary perspective, even though they're sister taxa, you don't really have to worry about them being lumped together because that's still a pretty sizable chunk of time. Oh, yeah. Usually a species is about 2 million years at most. Yeah, in that ballpark.

But they were found fairly close together geographically. They were both in the eastern part of China. The next closest relative to Hua Sha Jolong may be Crichton Peltza, which is also from late Cretaceous China. Speaking of Jurassic Park. Yeah, named after Michael Crichton. Cool. And that wasn't even the only new ankylosaur named last year. Or no, in the last four months. This one, funny you should have that slip of the tongue, was technically named in 2024, but...

after we had stopped recording because that always happens as soon as we stop. It's like, check out this new cool dinosaur. We've been keeping track the whole time and yeah, that was a bit of a blow. I was like, no, we just missed it. But then it's okay because Datai got to have even more of the spotlight as being the coolest Ankylosaur. It would have been harder to decide between these two because how do you compare one that's only the head and neck versus one that's everything but the head and neck? There we spared you from...

Having to choose. That's good. We will get to our dinosaur of the day in just a moment, but first we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College. If you're looking for an amazing way to spend your summer, there's no better choice than working with Dinosaur Bones. You've probably heard us talk before about Colorado Northwestern Community College, CNCC, because they have fantastic programs.

Yeah, they have both a field program and a lab program. And between the two, if you take both of them, which is an option, you can get up to eight college credits, although it's not just for college students. Each course is two weeks long, so you can spend up to four weeks if you do both the dig program and the fossil prep lab course. Ooh. Yeah.

But no matter what you choose, expert paleontologists will lead you through every step of the way. We actually met one of their paleontologists on our first ever dinosaur dig 10 years ago. Oh yeah, I can't believe it's been 10 years already. That was a great dig. It was. And CNCC has two dig sessions as well as two lab sessions, one each from early to mid-July and another from late July to early August.

Last year, we had several listeners sign up and space is limited. So if you want to guarantee your spot, you should sign up soon. Just go to cncc.edu slash dino dig to get all the details. Make sure you register online by May 31st. Again, that's cncc.edu slash dino dig.

If I come off of the GLP-1, it's not going to automatically make my weight yo-yo back.

And now onto our dinosaur of the day, Poposaurus, which was a request from Sue via our Patreon and Discord.

As we mentioned, papasaurus was an ankylosaur, specifically a nodosaurid, and it lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Texas in the U.S. It was found in the pawpaw formation, so you can guess how it got its name. It also lived about 100 million years ago. And being a nodosaur, it had a small head, a bulky body, long tail, short legs, and it was covered in bony armor plates, and it had spines and scutes on its back and tail.

But being a nodosaur, it did not have a club tail. It also walked on all fours and kicked its head low to the ground. I'm describing most nodosaurs because only the skull was found. Okay. So the opposite of the new ankylosaur. More like Datai. Yes. But like we were saying, finding only the skull isn't so bad because there's a lot of unique features there to go by. So Pavasaurus is estimated to be medium-sized, about 15 feet or 4.5 meters long.

What's really cool is it had these bony eyelids, which are often found in ankylosaurids, but not notosaurids. And it's actually the first notosaurid found with bony eyelids. I mean, we know of others since, but I guess that was the first. Back in the 90s. Yeah. Because it was discovered in May 1992 by Cameron Campbell. And then it was described by Yong-Nam Lee in 1996. The type and only species is Papasaurus campbelli.

And like I said, they found a mostly complete skull. It was just missing the lower jaw. Which isn't technically part of the skull. Yes. So, but it is good to have. It is. The genus name Papasaurus means papa lizard. And the papa formation is a marine formation. So that's cool. There was a dinosaur there. There was another nodosaur found in that formation, Texas eddies. But that might be a senior synonym of Papasaurus. Papasaurus was named in 1996 as...

And Texas Eddie's was named in 1995. A senior synonym. Hmm. That might mean that Pop House Horace's name could be in jeopardy. Maybe, but it seems okay for now.

There was a 2016 study of the skull where they did CT scans and they reconstructed the brain and nasal cavities and inner ear. And they found that the brain was about 30% of the skull. The brain's almost four inches or 10 centimeters long and 1.4 inches or 35 millimeters wide. That's not too bad. No. The brain, however, did not have a flocculus. That's the part of the brain that helps with fine motor skills like controlling head movements and stabilizing your gaze. Okay.

But it did have large nasal cavities and its sense of smell was more powerful than many theropods that lived at the same time. Although the nasal cavity was not as large as later ankylosaurus. It did have bony ridges in the nasal cavities like other ankylosaurus. And even though they weren't as large as later ankylosaurus, they were large and they would have helped it to keep cool and smell food, smell potential mates, and smell for danger. There's a lot of things you can smell. Yes.

The large nasal cavity may also mean that it can make a lower range of sounds. It had hearing similar to modern crocodiles, and it could probably also hear a lower range of sounds. Like I mentioned, the other dinosaur found from around the same time and place is that notosaurid Texas eddies. And then other animals that lived around the same time and place include pterosaurs, fish, and turtles. And our fun fact of the day is that there is an animal named Dinosaurus, but it's not a dinosaur. What is it?

Well, let me tell you why it's named Dinosaurus. Part of the reason is it was named in 1847 by Johann Fischer, which is only five years after Dinosauria was named by Richard Owen. So there wasn't that strong association between the name dinosaur slash us with an animal yet.

The holotype was found in a copper mine in Orenburg, Russia, which is in or just west of Siberia. The holotype is a partial snout. It lived in the Permian, which is one period before the Triassic.

Dinosaurus lived millions of years before the first dinosaurs. So there wasn't any confusion when it was named that it was like, oh, this is one of those animals that's similar to Dinosauria. So I'm going to name it Dinosaurus. They knew that it was going to be a different group of dinosaurs for sure. Dinosaurus is a therapsid, meaning it's closer to a mammal than it is to a dinosaur. And it may have been a gorgonopsid.

Oh, that's cool, but very different from a dinosaur. It is. We talked all about Gorgonopsids in our 13th episode of I Know Paleo, and my favorite description of them is that they are quote-unquote saber-toothed dogs because they do have sort of a wolf-like body shape, although a little longer and a little bulkier, and then they have big old saber teeth, which are very cool animals. Dinosaurus has a pretty messy name history.

Another fossil from the same spot was given the name Rhopolodon by the same author two years earlier. And then after noticing the confusion with Dinosauria, he assigned Dinosaurus...

the species in it, to the species in the genus Rhopolodon. So it became Rhopolodon dinosaurus. No, it's got a species name. I just don't want to go through all the species names because it's too confusing. Oh, I see. You just move the species name over. Dinosaurus species name turned into Rhopolodon species name. Yeah. Okay. And then later on, the fossils of Rhopolodon and dinosaurus

were thought to be from the exact same individual in that same mine that came from the same spot. So it was like, are these even the same animal? Maybe we should just use one name. And it seems like the original author was going with Rapaladon, but unfortunately then the fossils were lost. So we'll never know. There are casts of them at the Paleontological Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences though. So that's better than a lot of fossils that have been lost.

But even with the cast, they're just really small and there aren't enough unique details in them to tell if they warrant being their own species or not. So there's sort of a little bit of disagreement there. So the name Dinosaurus is basically in limbo.

But it doesn't really matter that much because there are so many better Gorgonopsian specimens to look at that if you want to know about dinosaurs and animals like it, you can just look at all these other Gorgonopsians. Yeah. Less confusing with the names too. Yes. Well, now we know. Yep.

That wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned. In our next episode, we will have at least one new dinosaur to talk about because we've got like 20 to choose from. Yeah. And we'll also have the winners from our first round of Dino Duels competitions so you can find out how well you're doing in your bracket. Excellent. Thanks again. And until next time.