A New Carcharodontosaurid That You'll Never See
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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 534th episode, we've got some news, including a new Carcharodontosaurid. We also have a correction from our book, which is about Carcharodontosaurus. Yes. We're going to announce our Dino Duels winner.

And we have dinosaur of the day, Dacododon, not to be confused with Iguanodon. There's also a fun fact, which is that the new Carcharodontosaurid was almost named Allosaurus, or something that sounds a lot like Allosaurus. Spelled slightly differently. But fortunately, that possible error in judgment was avoided. Yeah.

But before we get into all that, as always, we'd like to thank some of our patrons. And this week we have 10 new patrons to thank. And they are Matt, Anthony, Michelle, Francisco, or as one of our daughters would say, Franskisco, Jason, Charybdis, HeavyDevyC, Amelia, Argregarg, and NixAko.

Thank you all very much for joining. Yes, thank you so much. We really appreciate our community. And I like the reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide with Argregarg. Yeah. And I also like the Greek sea monster Charybdis. I love all the Greek mythology stuff. Lots of good references in these names. There are. And as a reminder, if you'd like us to change your shout-out name at any time, you can send us a message in Patreon and we will update it.

And if you want to join and be a dino at all, then head over to patreon.com slash inodino. And also just as a side note real quick, we are running our annual listener survey. So if you want to let us know about what you like about the show and ways that we could make it even better, then head over to bit.ly slash ikdsurvey25.

Yeah, it's kind of funny. It's almost like we're doing it on a fiscal year and it's April. So we're doing our annual things in April rather than doing it on a calendar year basis in December. We'll probably change back to calendar year next time.

Speaking of our community, we want to thank Tumorex for pointing out the error in our National Geographic kids book that just came out. It didn't take long. No. What was it like the day after it came out? We find out about the first error in it. That's awesome that someone read the book that fast. Yeah. Thank you. And thank you for supporting us by buying the book. Yes. And thank you for pointing it out because...

I mean, errors happen, but it's good to know so we can fix it because we did alert our publisher. It'll be fixed in reprints. Oh, they told us that? Mm-hmm. That's good. And the error is that Giganotosaurus in the little fast facts box says that it was a late Jurassic dinosaur when it should have said late Cretaceous dinosaur? Yes.

which is unfortunate. It is. We think that it was probably a copy and paste error because when you're doing all those fancy graphics, a lot of times the easiest way to get it on every page is to copy and paste it. I know I do that all the time in different forms. And it does look really cool. I like the fast facts section. It's got a cool little map that shows where in the world it was discovered and all that. And I remember carefully looking at all the maps to make sure that little dot was in just the right place.

But unfortunately, it looks like in the copy and pasting process, the maybe Diplodocus one got maybe that was the one that was getting copy and pasted because I think it had the exact year range that ended up in the Giganotosaurus spread. So I think it was one of those things where you copy and paste something 50 times and you just miss the one. Well, our bad. We missed it.

Yeah, we didn't notice it during the step when we had the almost final draft for review. That's it. We did have expert reviewers and fact checkers for this book. It's just...

Sometimes the things were checked in a Word doc format, and sometimes they were checked when it was more of the final layout. Yeah, and we noticed some other things. On that same page, I was looking at my notes. I corrected something that said it was 162 centimeters. I was like, that should say 163 centimeters long, just to be complete. But I missed the late Jurassic versus late Cretaceous thing on the same page.

It's frustrating. Missed the other detail. Yeah. Well, I'm glad it'll be corrected in the reprints. Yes. And I also like that in the same spread, we mentioned that lived about 30 million years before T-Rex. So if you look at that, you might think, wait, T-Rex was 66 million years ago. And this says it's from the late Jurassic. That doesn't add up. And maybe, hopefully, people will notice which one is the mistake. Yeah.

It was all done on purpose to test whether you would catch the error or not. Yeah, critical thinking. Yes. That's what it is. We do mention in the book that there are going to be mistakes or rather there will be changes and some of the things in the book will be inaccurate eventually. We didn't think it would necessarily be this soon and in this way, but you know, it is what it is. Yes. Well, but thank you again, Tumorix, for letting us know.

I do want to thank the whole team at National Geographic Kids, though, because, yes, we have the one error. I'm glad it's going to be fixed in the reprints, but we are so happy with how the book came out. Mm-hmm.

It is so pretty. Yeah, and there were so many people that worked on it. Of course, there's the artist, Franco Tempesta, who did an amazing job with all of the illustrations, and our editor, Katie, our expert reviewers, Tito and Aline, who caught so many things for us. Oh, yeah. And...

The whole team at Nat Geo Kids, Catherine the Fact Checker, there was another editor, Christina, who helped us, Lisa, Lori, and so many others on the marketing team. Just everybody we really appreciate. And of course, our Velocir readers in our community for supporting us with this book. Just the amount of support and help we've gotten for this book has been so heartwarming. So thank you. And if there are other errors,

We'll be mad at ourselves for missing them, but we do appreciate knowing that they're out there. Yeah, you can send them to us at bill.ly slash dino questions if you have any feedback about the book.

Or if you really like the book, you could give us a review wherever you got it. That would be very helpful. Yes. I don't think we have any reviews on Amazon yet as of this recording. And those are very helpful. They are. Hint, hint. But yeah, I'm super pumped with the book. I was so happy with how it turned out. I'd love to look at all the pictures in it. It's almost all new art. It's just so cool.

And that one error is pretty minor, I think, in the grand scheme of things. Well, I'm annoyed at us for not noticing. Yeah. It's an easy one to catch, unfortunately. It's not like some length estimate or something that you have to actually look up. This is one that we know just by looking at it like, oh, no, that's not a Jurassic dinosaur. That's a Cretaceous dinosaur. What were we thinking? And now it's time for the stunning conclusion of our Dino Duels championship. All right.

Who won? Well, first we need a recap on where we were. Sure, sure. So I believe I had 19 points and you had 15 points going in. I'll take your word for it. I'm pretty sure. But regardless, the championship is worth eight points. So it was going to come down to who selected the correct dinosaur for the championship.

The championship, of course, being between Giraffatitan and Tyrannosaurus. And the winner was Giraffatitan. What? Whoa. Did not expect that. I did. That was the one that I picked as the championship winner. I thought there might be an upset in that.

With Giraffatitan. Well, well done. Yeah. So I got a total of 27 points in my bracket out of a possible 32. And you won. Yeah, I definitely won against you. I don't know if I would have won overall. I think I might have. I'm going to have to run the numbers. But I think you ended up with a total of 15 points because that last one is worth eight points just for the one guess. So even though we got a similar number of men,

matchups right you got most of yours right in the first round i got all this later rounds right right which is the way to go if you can choose so yeah giraffe titan pulled off the big upset it was a very close race i was checking in on it periodically to see how well giraffe titan was doing because i was hoping giraffe titan would pull it off

And there were a lot of comments going back and forth on whether or not T-Rex should win, if T-Rex is the best, or if Giraffatitan should win. And I liked Ryan, the biochemist at the end said, all hail the new king of the dinosaurs. Giraffatitan. I'm not mad about it being a sauropod. Yeah. But are you mad that you doubted your favorite group and didn't have a go to the finale?

What are you trying to like fuel the fire or something? I'm happy a sauropod won. Me too, because I won. There wasn't an ankylosaur. So if there had been an ankylosaur, I might have been tempted to put that one all the way to the end and then I would have really lost.

But yeah, Giraffatitan won the 2025 Dino Duels Mesozoic Championship, as I like to call it. Nice. If this was popular, we'll find out during our survey. But if it was popular, we might do this again next year and just use...

the top 16 dinosaurs from 2025. I think it would be fun to have a more even playing field of all new dinosaurs. So none of them have any extra name recognition because none of them will be super well known. Unless there's a new Tyrannosaurus species or something. Yeah, I guess that's always possible.

But then as we've seen today, it doesn't necessarily mean that it'll win just because it's a new Tyrannosaurus. True. But it is likely that it would make it at least a couple rounds in. I have to figure out how we would sort them because we did this one, you know, Triassic, Jurassic, early and late Cretaceous. But if we're doing it based on a year worth of dinosaurs, there's a high probability that those wouldn't be so even.

Maybe we just throw one into a bucket that it doesn't really belong in. I don't know. We'll have to see. Yeah. We'll also have to see if people even like this. But next week, we will announce the winner. I just need to check with the winner if they want to be officially recognized before I share who won. So stay tuned for that. So because there's that mistake in our book, I decided we should do a carcharodontosaurid today to appease the carcharodontosaurus fans. Maybe at least do a little something.

Make it up a little bit. Yeah, hopefully. So there is a new Carcharodontosaurid species that was named. The name is the only way, though, that this Carcharodontosaurid is new. The bones obviously are over 95 million years old from the Cretaceous, not the Jurassic. They were dug up over 100 years ago, and no one has even seen these bones in over 80 years. So it's all around old. This might sound similar to another dinosaur.

The fossils were found on an expedition led by Ernst Stromer 114 years ago, plus or minus a couple years. Stromer's collection was stored at the Bavarian State College of Paleontology in Munich. Stromer and his colleagues, especially Richard Markgraf, spent years searching for fossils in Africa. Like many dinosaur paleontologists, Stromer started out looking for mammal remains. And then he found dinosaurs, including Spinosaurus. Yep.

Specifically, he was looking for human remains. He correctly subscribed to the hypothesis that the first humans evolved in Africa, and he wanted to find some of those remains. The most relevant site that he explored is the Bahari Oasis in Egypt, west of Cairo.

He went there because he thought the rock there was from the Eocene, which is well after non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. But it turns out that area, the formation was way older. Yes. Fortunately for us, the formation was about twice as old as he thought, dating back to right in the middle of the Cretaceous, which is about 100 million years ago, not 150 million years ago in the late Jurassic, like our book says. From 1910 to 1914, stratosphere.

Stromer and really mostly Markgraf found fossils from sharks, turtles, crocodilians, and dinosaurs in the area. But it took years for some of the fossils to make it back to Germany. At the time of their expeditions, Egypt was controlled by the British and political tensions between Britain and Germany prevented transporting the fossils back to Germany for quite a while.

In 1915, in the middle of World War I, Stromer named Spinosaurus aegypticus from some of the remains that were found in the Bahari Oasis.

The species name Egypticus is after Egypt. And then after World War I ended, he eventually arranged transport to Munich in 1922 of some of the other dinosaur fossils. It took some time because of the war. Yes. A couple years later in Algeria, which was then controlled by the French, geologists Charles Deparet and Justin Savornin found another large carnivorous dinosaur.

As was the fashion. They named it as a species of megalosaurus. The old wastebasket taxon. Yeah. It's a big carnivore. Let's name it after megalosaurus. So they named it megalosaurus saharicus in 1925. Sahara Desert. Yeah. Saharicus was after the Sahara Desert where it was found.

Stromer noticed the teeth from his old collection, at least some of the teeth, matched the new quote-unquote megalosaurus species, and he assigned his find to that species. But in the process, he recognized that it shouldn't be called a species of megalosaurus because it really didn't seem all that similar to megalosaurus other than being a large carnivore. So he came up with the new name, Carcharodontosaurus, and that's after the great white genus Carcharodon. Hmm.

There's a case of learning from the teeth. Yes. Sometimes dinosaurs were named just on teeth and later on it's found that's not enough. Yeah. Well, that's basically the case here, though. Carcharodontosaurus, previously Megalosaurus saharicus,

find was basically the teeth. And he thought those teeth were similar to great white teeth, which means in a way you can think of Carcharodontosaurus as a great white shark that roamed on land. A land shark. I feel like there's a cartoon of sharks that did that. There's street sharks, which is a cartoon. There's also an SNL sketch called Land Shark. I think I was thinking of street sharks. Yeah. I watched street sharks as a kid. It used to kind of scare me a little bit. But back to Carcharodontosaurus.

It actually was more ferocious, I would say, than a great white shark. The teeth are more impressive, almost more like a megalodon tooth than a great white tooth. Stromer did not change the species name because there was no reason to change the species name, so the official name became Carcharodontosaurus saharicus.

which is interesting because the holotype was from the Sahara desert and Stromers was another example that was from Egypt. Whereas with Spinosaurus today, it's kind of going the other way around where we have the original from one place going the other way.

Unfortunately, most of Stromer's fossils were lost from the Allied bombing during World War II. For those who aren't familiar, the Allies, mostly Britain's Royal Air Force and the U.S. Air Force, basically destroyed Munich, including many priceless dinosaur fossils in 1944. Including the hollow type of Spinosaurus. Yes. And the most frustrating part is that it was completely avoidable. Besides the obvious that the Allies could have just chosen not to carpet bomb the entire city...

There was an initial bombing in 1940, a much smaller bombing, and it was an attempt by the Royal Air Force to kill Hitler. They bombed the hall where he made a speech on the night of November 9th, 1940, but unfortunately it was a few minutes after Hitler finished his speech and he escaped unscathed.

Probably partly because of this bombing, Ernst Stromer tried to get his collection moved to a safer location. Oh, yes, but the Nazis didn't like him. Actually, they punished him in many ways, including sending his sons to the front lines. Yeah, because he didn't get along with the Nazi policies, right? And I think he openly spoke about it. Which now makes him kind of a hero, but at the time was risky behavior in Munich. Yeah.

But then four years later, in 1944, the Allies decided to completely carpet bomb the city of Munich. One reason I could find is that the city was a major center of engine production. It's where BMW, Bavarian Motorworks, is and was headquartered. They made lots of engines for engines.

planes and other machines that were used in World War II. There were also strategic airports around the Munich area, including Oberpfaffenhofen to the southwest. Hopefully I got the pronunciation right. That airport was the location of the Dornier plant, which produced the Luftwaffe's fastest piston engine aircraft in World War II, which is the Dornier DO 335, in case you're curious. And

It used a pair of V-12s, one at the front and one at the back of the plane in a push-pull configuration, which is kind of interesting. It had over 1,700 horsepower and it could reach 474 miles an hour or 763 kilometers an hour. That's pretty fast. It is, although there were much faster jet and rocket-powered aircraft. Sorry, that was just a random World War II aside because I can't help it. Because you're a dad now? Yeah, there's a joke that Mulaney made that every dad has to be a World War II expert, so...

I'm just doing my due diligence. Studying for some kind of trivia contest in the future. It will happen at some point. So it's possible that the development of that aircraft and others like it was the motivation for the bombing. But even if that was the motivation, it didn't really work. The first 10 examples of that plane were completed just the next month. So even though they carpet bombed so much, it really didn't slow much down.

Unfortunately, another likely reason and maybe a more likely reason for the indiscriminate bombing is that Munich is considered the Nazi party's birthplace. So destroying it was seen as useful propaganda for the allies. So they probably just wanted to basically wipe Munich off the face of the earth and show a bunch of pictures of it and be like, look, we destroyed the Nazi thing without thinking about the people that lived there, including people like Stromer who wanted nothing to do with the Nazi party.

So the bombing of Munich killed thousands of people, wounded over 10,000, and destroyed over 90% of the old part of the city. That destruction included most of the Bavarian state collection of paleontology, which of course included Spinosaurus, the Titanosaur Egyptosaurus, and the Carcharodontosaurid material that we've been talking about.

Luckily, though, the endocast of the brain case from the skull of the carcharodontosaur material survived. And that's basically the only surviving piece of the carcharodontosaur material is that brain case. Not terrible. I should say endocast of the brain case. No, it's not the worst thing to have for sure.

And then more recently, a surviving photo of a mounted specimen was discovered. Oh, that's nice. It's kind of like how there's photos of the Spinosaurus mounted, too. Oh, there are? I was thinking we only had drawings of it. There's at least one photo. Oh, cool. So this photo is up close. It reminds me a lot, actually, ironically, of the Megalosaurus mount.

up in Oxford, where it's basically a leg with partial hips. And then there's also a couple vertebrae and a little bit of skull material with it. It's very similar to that megalosaurus mount in a lot of ways. But like that megalosaurus mount, there's a fair amount of diagnostic information in those bones. So this photograph is good enough that

Kellerman and others just named a new carcharodontosaurid in PLOS One based largely on that photo and also on the endocast of the brain case. So that carcharodontosaurid is no longer considered to be carcharodontosaurus saharicus. They named it Tomary raptor.

with the explanation of, quote, meaning thief from the beloved land is a combination of one of the more informal ancient Egyptian names for Egypt, Tameri, meaning beloved land, and the Latin word for thief, raptor. And then Mark Raffaei is, quote, in reference to Richard Mark Raff, the Austrian fossil collector who discovered most of the dinosaur remains described by Stromer, end quote.

Yes, they worked very closely together for many years and had a lot of exchanges over the years during the war. Yeah, I believe Mark Graf had been living in Egypt for a while. I saw one account that he was living there for maybe a decade before Stromer and him started working together, like around the year 1900, doing other work before they started working together. And by war, I mean World War I. Yeah, because it's research spans both wars.

So those original Carcharodontosaurus teeth that were called Megalosaurus saharicus by Depere back in 1925 have since been lost and are likely not diagnostic enough to name a genus anyway. Oh yeah, teeth. Yeah, unlike mammals, which Stromer was initially more familiar with.

So in 1995, a nearly complete skull was found in the Kem Kem beds in Morocco. And then in 2007, it was officially designated as the neotype for Carcharodontosaurus saharicus, replacing the holotype as the type specimen and the one that is the official designated keeper of that name that all the future discoveries have to be compared against.

Because the Stromer material is older, there could be an argument that it should be the holotype, but the authors were happy to give it a new name instead. Neither the older Stromer material or the neotype material is from the same location in Algeria, so neither of them have a great argument for being the neotype. But if anything, the Moroccan neotype is closer.

At least geographically, I'm not entirely sure about the exact age comparison of the specimens. The authors also say that the material in the one that was named the neotype in Morocco is more similar physically to what we know of the original holotype. So it's a more suitable neotype.

But in any event, this new slash old Carcharodontosaurid, Tomary Raptor, has several differences that you can see from the photo. The most obvious one is a, quote, horn-like rugosity on the nasal. Oh, so a rough...

horn-like thing on the snout. Yes. Some people have called it a quote-unquote horned dinosaur, which is upsetting to me because that is the shorthand for a ceratopsian. Yeah, except now we know ceratopsians aren't named for their horns. Yeah, I know. They're named for their rostrum, their beaks. But no,

But nobody calls Ceratopsians the beaked dinosaurs. But this horn also is only about an inch or three centimeters tall. It could have been longer in life, especially with a keratin covering. But a couple of inches of horn on a skull that's four or five feet long isn't exactly the main feature of the skull. I would argue it's the huge mouth full of serrated teeth.

That's what the prey would be looking at. Yeah. Although maybe potential suitable mates would be looking at that horn and focused on that. I don't know. Without the keratin sheath, the horn on its snout is about the same size as one of its teeth, just the erupted part of the tooth, not including the root. With the sheath, it's probably more like the size of the tooth, including the root. So it's kind of a tooth-like projection. You can look at it that way. Probably wasn't serrated, but yeah.

The horn is located right in the middle of the snout, about halfway between the nostrils and the eyes, and there's just the one in the middle. It also did have a pair of ridges, one above each eye, sort of looking like angry eyebrows as a lot of these allosauroids had. And another feature that it had, which was different than Carcharodontosaurus saharicus, is that Tamariraptor has a larger cerebrum.

That's one of the features that we can tell because we have that surviving endocast of the brain, and then the neotype of Carcharodontosaurus saharicus has a good enough skull that we can compare the cerebrum, which is pretty cool. Overall, the size of Tamari raptor is smaller than the Carcharodontosaurus saharicus neotype.

The maxilla, the bone on the upper jaw that holds the teeth, if complete, would probably be about 70 centimeters or 28 inches long, and it probably would have had about 12 or 13 teeth in each maxilla. So you're talking about a similar number of teeth really to T. rex in that same ballpark, also large and serrated.

Stromer estimated that this Tamari raptor back when he was calling it Carcharodontosaurus was about eight or nine meters or about 26 to 30 feet in overall body length. Pretty good size. And it seems like a pretty good estimate to saying that it's a little bit smaller than the Carcharodontosaurus neotype, which is more in the 40 foot type ballpark.

The interesting piece to me is the last sentence of the abstract, which says, quote, Oh, Spinosaurus. I know, and that's something I've been saying. So...

Like most people, I get excited when something confirms something I've been saying. I was very excited by this because I've been saying for a little while we shouldn't be naming Spinosaurus aegypticus from a different specimen in the chem chem beds in Morocco when it's literally Egypt Spinosaurus. Why do we want a neotype from Morocco when Dale Russell named Spinosaurus moroccanus

You know, the Spinosaurus from Morocco a while back. I don't see any reason to name a neotype from Morocco, especially when we're seeing things like they didn't have the same Carcharodontosaur.

There's good reason to believe that they wouldn't have the same Spinosaur as well. And in fact, when Spinosaurus Moroccanus was named, Dale Russell pointed out that it seemed to have a longer neck. Spinosaurus Moroccanus seemed to have a longer neck than Spinosaurus Egypticus did, which obviously has been disputed. And there's a lot of people that think Spinosaurus Egypticus should get a neotype from that amazing new find that Spinosaurus

He's our Ibrahim has been describing in pieces over the years. You could argue it's individual variation. You could, but they're just so far apart in geography. You know, they're like thousand plus miles apart. They're not from the same formation, so they wouldn't have been the exact same time period. It just doesn't make sense to me to name them the same species. I could see the argument both ways, though, because, yeah, thousands of miles, but some dinosaurs did migrate. Yeah.

The really risky thing for Spinosaurus fans is if you name it Spinosaurus moroccanus and then you discover later that there are other species that are sort of slated in between them, then you might have to split out Spinosaurus moroccanus into its own genus and then

And then it would no longer be Spinosaurus. It would have to get its own name. And Spinosaurus would only be that Ernst Stromer find from way back in the day we don't have anymore. And we'd have to have some new name for this one. And Spinosaurus is such a cool name and everybody's so familiar with it that it would be unfortunate if it was only relegated to this old thing that was destroyed. Well, we'll see what happens. Maybe there'll be more research on this. Yeah. I would like it to have its own species name, though. I think it's...

It would be really, really frustrating if in like 50 years we found another really good example from Egypt, but the neotype of Spinosaurus aegypticus was in Morocco and then they had to come up with a new name for the one that's in Egypt. It would just be so confusing. And that's the whole point of these names is not to be confusing. So the one aegypticus, in my opinion, should be based on one from Egypt. The one true aegypticus. Yeah, exactly.

So that's the new Carcharodontosaurid. New in virtually no way other than the fact that it has a name now, Tamariraptor. And it's cool too that Richard Markgraf finally got a dinosaur named after him because he was such a big part of those finds that we all know so much about. Yes, he was.

I remember when I was researching Ernst Stromer, Richard Markgraf's name came up a lot. Yeah. From what I could tell, he did most of the finding of the fossils and Stromer did most of the writing up of them. Maybe some of the analysis or most of the analysis.

Well, we will get to our dinosaur of the day in just a moment, which is not a theropod, not even a carnivore. Have some diversity. Yeah, there we go. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors.

This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College. You can learn from the experts there this summer. Yeah, both in the field and in the lab, paleontologists there will guide you through the process of taking dinosaurs from the rock to a museum-ready showpiece. Ooh. Yeah. You'll learn the proper techniques for handling some of the world's most valuable objects, in my opinion, dinosaur fossils. No need to panic, because you'll know the proper techniques. Yeah. I guess...

It's not just my opinion. They are extremely valuable specimens. In the field, this includes identifying fossils, digging them up, stabilizing them, and jacketing them for transport. In the lab, it means separating the rock from the bone, using an air scribe, and preserving them for future generations. There are sure to be surprises both in the field and in the lab, and having experts to help problem-solve is invaluable.

Yes, and because you can learn so much in this program, you can get up to eight college credits if you're interested. So head over to cncc.edu slash dino dig to get all the details and make sure you register online by May 31st. Again, that's cncc.edu slash dino dig.

Today, the beverage aisle looks a lot different than it used to. America's beverage companies are working together. We're delivering the options everyone wants. In fact, nearly 60% of beverages Americans buy have zero sugar. You'll find more variety than ever, including more of your favorites, now available with zero sugar. You'll also find more sizes and clear calorie information on the front of every can, bottle, and pack.

We know when it comes to finding balance, the more choices, the better. And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Dakotadon, which was a request from Pachycelskisaurus via our Patreon and Discord. So thank you.

Moving a bit away from theropods and carnivorous dinosaurs, Dakotadon was an iguanodont that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now South Dakota in the U.S. It was found in the Lakota Formation, and it looked similar to iguanodon. It could walk on all fours, it had a bulky body, a long tail, and an elongated head, and for a long time, it was known as an iguanodon.

It was estimated to be about 20 feet or 6 meters long and weigh one metric ton. It was first described in 1989 by David Weishampel and Philip Bjork, but they described it as Iguanodon lakotaensis. And the species name refers to, quote, the land of the Lakota and the horizon from which the type specimen was collected, end quote. There's a lot of dinosaurs from Lakota lands. So it makes sense that you would get at least one species named after you. Mm-hmm.

and they described a partial skull and parts of the skeleton. A man named Louis Rosso had found the fossils when hunting rattlesnakes on a hogback, and a hogback's a long, narrow ridge or series of hills, and this was near Sturgis, and he excavated them with the help of his family. Dale Rosso, who's Louis' son, told John Willard from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology about them, and Louis had been storing the fossils in his garage.

But now the fossils are donated. They're at the Museum of Geology. There's debate about where Dakotadon, or formerly known as Iguanodon, fit in.

Some paleontologists considered it a new species of Iguanodon. Some considered it to be the same as Iguanodon burnisartensis, which was found in Europe. That would mean that this species had a really wide geographic range. Yeah, I would say so. North America and Europe. From an island in Europe all the way over to North America. And this is in the Cretaceous when they were really separated. Yes. So that's, I mean, think about that with the spinosaurus debate. Yeah, maybe not. Yeah.

And some considered it to be a new genus.

I thought it was interesting because the paper that first described Decododon when it was described as a guanodon locotaensis said that it was, quote, the first species from the United States that can be clearly referred to the European genus a guanodon. And they also said it was the, quote, first indisputable record of a guanodon from North America. It's a genus that's less problematic than as a species. Yes. I think it's just hard for dinosaurs to be indisputable. Yeah, that's true. Bold claims. Mm-hmm.

So they described the nearly complete skull, part of the lower jaws, and two vertebrae, one from the neck and one from the tail. And the skull has been described as oblong, long and oval. It was considered to be a guanodon because of the proportions of its face, the way its beak looked, and the patterns of the teeth, as well as other patterns in the bones.

However, this species, this specimen, was larger than Iguanodon atherfieldensis, another species of Iguanodon, and it also had fewer teeth and a few other minor differences compared to the European Iguanodon species.

So Gregory Paul renamed it Dakotadon in 2008, and that genus name means Dakotadooth. It was found in South Dakota. When Gregory Paul named Dakotadon in 2008, he mentioned that Iguanodon was a, quote, taxonomic grab bag, which is another way of saying wastebasket taxon. I think I like that better.

Grab bag. Yeah. Anyway, he said that the species had lived most of the early Cretaceous and they were in most of the northern hemisphere, which just seems like too much. Yes. But as I mean, genera sometimes are really broad. It just depends. Mm hmm.

Species shouldn't be so broad, but genera occasionally. It doesn't help that Iguanodon was first named based on teeth also. Yeah, that's for sure. Going back to the teeth thing. And more specimens of Iguanodon have been found, which does help. And since then, there's been a lot of splitting. There have. Even different specimens of Iguanodontians that were on the same tiny little island off of Great Britain. If there's multiple genera there, this one that's way over...

On Lakota lands, the U.S. clearly seems like it should be a different genus. Yes. So Gregory Paul found the skull of Dakotadon to be very different from Iguanodon. And he described the skull as having classic Iguanodon proportions, meaning it's long, it's low, it's narrow. There's the long beacon jaws and it has large nostrils.

But the skull had enough differences to be its own genus. There's a lot of details in the jaw, and it also has a relatively large hole in the front of the eye sockets. He also considered Dachododon to be basal to Iguanodon, so it doesn't have as many new features or derived features.

In 2014, Boyd and Pagnac, along with the grandchildren of Louis Rosso, went back to where the Dakotadon fossils were first found, and they were able to locate the original site where the fossils were found, as well as more bones. Awesome. Yeah, that can tell you a lot more about the dinosaur. That'd be so cool going to where your grandparent found dinosaur fossils and getting to find more of that same animal. Yeah. I can't imagine how cool that would be.

So in 2015, those fossils got re-described as well as the new bones, and the holotype now includes a partial skull, lower jaws, one backbone, and two tail bones.

In the 2015 paper, they found that some of the bones had been misidentified and there were some deformations in the skull that made the first descriptions inaccurate. But they did find two features in the skull that made it unique, including a triangular projection near the top of the head that goes into the underside of the prefrontal. That's another bone near the top of the head. The details, the details make a difference with dinosaur species. They do. Because if you're the exact same species, why would your skull have different bones in it?

Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place as Dachododon include the Ankylosaur, the armored dinosaur, Hoplitosaurus, the Iguanodon osmoscosaurus, and an indeterminate sauropod. Managed to get a sauropod mention. Near the end of the episode. Snuck it in. And some other animals that lived around the same time and place include small mammals, fish, and turtles.

Although now that we're mentioning it, the lost dinosaur from the Bahari Oasis, Egyptosaurus, is also a titanosaur. So there was a sauropod mentioned a little bit earlier too. I just didn't mention that it was a sauropod. So Egyptosaurus could be anything.

Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on calling something a species on different sides of the world, because even though the odds of it being the same exact species that could mate isn't really the criteria that we use with paleontology. You have to actually find something different in the bones. So if you can't find anything different, you don't really have any choice but to assign it to the same species. Yes. Sometimes it takes a while to find those details. You work with what you've got. Yep.

And sometimes the details don't really fossilize. And there's probably a lot of things that are lumped together right now as the same species that wouldn't have been in life, but we just don't see the differences in the bones. And our fun fact of the day is that the peer-reviewed article, which named Tamari Raptor,

was originally going to call it Allosaurus. Yes. Oh, yes. This was... Somebody wrote this comment on the dinosaur mailing list. Yeah. It's spelled A-L-L-I-saurus. So it looks quite a bit different than Allosaurus. It's A-L-L-L-I-S-S-A-U-R-U-S, which to me reads as Allosaurus. Yeah. Or...

Allosaurus? Allosaurus. Yeah. But it's pretty close to Allosaurus, especially since we don't really say Allosaurus. Most people say Allosaurus. So then this is Allosaurus. Basically the same. But that is a really cool name because the etymology of Allosaurus is a combination of the Arabic for marauder, Alice, and the Greek for

for lizard, for saurus. So basically it means like the marauding dinosaur, which is just a cool name. Allosaurus. Isn't that what I said? You were saying owl. I think it'd be allosaurus. No, it's allosaurus, like algebra. Oh. That's why it's so similar. Yes. I'm not that familiar with Arabic. So I guess that's good news for allosaurus fans, that you don't have to worry about allosaurus stealing some of the thunder. Yeah.

Yes, that could be confusing. Especially since it's an allosauroid. The allosauroid allosaurus. Not to be confused with allosaurus. And on that note, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned. Next week, we'll have even more new dinosaurs, or at least one new dinosaur, because we've got a lot of new dinosaurs to cover. And don't forget to take our listener survey at bit.ly slash ikdsurvey25.

Thanks again and until next time.

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