An oviraptorosaurian lovebird
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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 532nd episode... We've got another new dinosaur. Surprise, surprise, because there were, what, 20 to catch up on? Yeah, we've done like one or two. This one's really cool. It's an enigmatic wading dinosaur. Enigmatic, hmm. I

I feel like we've used that Latin root before, but I don't remember what it is. I'll have to wait to see. Oh, that's not the name of it. It's just enigmatic because it's a waiting dinosaur, possibly. Oh, I see. Okay. We also have our dino duels continuing because we're down to eight. And after this episode, we'll be down to four dinosaurs left in the duel bracket. And we have our dinosaur of the day,

Foo-wee-ong-a-saurus, the first sauropod named from Thailand. Because I always got to sneak a sauropod in. It's pretty easy to do. It's like a third of dinosaurs. And we have our fun fact. Yes, we can thank dinosaurs, specifically sauropods, I got them in again, for our fruit today. Ah, getting back to the angiosperm situation. Yes. Evolution of plants. Yes.

But before we get into all of that, as always, we'd like to thank some of our patrons, because as well as there being many new dinosaurs while we were gone, we also got many new patrons. Yay! And this week, our 10 patrons to thank are Myosaurus, Half-Blood Fiend, Garrett, not me, a different Garrett, Zero, Denver Hunter, Bennett B, Ejeslik Wit,

Hannah Monslama, Pamela, and Matthew. Excellent names. They are some very good names. Thank you all very much for joining. Next week, we'll have another 10 new patrons to thank because we're still getting through our backlog.

We really appreciate it, and we couldn't do this podcast without you. Yes, and good news, we sent out our Allosaurus patches. So for our dino-it-alls at the Triceratops tier and above, expect those in the mail soon. Maybe you've already gotten them by the time this episode airs. Yes, that's true. Yeah, if you were a Triceratops patron and up between January and February of this year, and you gave us your address in Patreon, meaning you put in an address and didn't click the

opt out of mailable rewards or however that works, then you should be getting it. And if you're not on our Patreon yet, but you want to join our Dino It All community, then head on over to patreon.com slash inodino. And before we get into the news, we're going to go through our Dino Duels winners in our 2025 Dino Duels Championship. There were just four matchups because, you know, with these single eliminations, it gets cut in half every time. Mm hmm.

The first matchup was the middle late Jurassic final, and that was between Megalosaurus and Giraffatitan. Come on, Megalosaurus. Megalosaurus got annihilated. Giraffatitan won in a landslide. Really? Yeah, I'm surprised he didn't go for Giraffatitan. It's the sauropod. I don't know. I was going for Megalosaurus because 200 years and... Yeah, you were going for the one you thought would win, right? Yeah. Not the one that you like better. Mm-hmm.

Well, I went for Giraffatitan. Well, good for you. Which means we're all tied up because one win in this round is worth two in the first round. The next one is the Triassic-Jurassic period final. That one was between Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus. Well, I definitely didn't get this one. I said Gajirasaurus.

Oh, that's right, because that was the one you got wrong the first time. The correct answer was Herrerasaurus, which I also got wrong because I didn't have Herrerasaurus making it out of the first round. So you've got one and I've got zero so far. Yep, and we're tied in total points. All right, up next is the early Cretaceous final. That was Deinonychus versus Ichthyovenator.

I went with Deinonychus. Me too. All right. Still tied. Wait, just to be clear, Deinonychus won? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Maybe people were imagining a pack of Deinonychus going after an Ichthyovenator, or they just like Deinonychus better. Mm-hmm.

We didn't really specify what the criteria was. Nope. I enjoy all the different criteria. Some people have mentioned what they're voting on, like Argregarg said they're voting purely on cuteness, which I appreciate. So Tyrannosaurus versus Dyrrhachosaurus, late Cretaceous. Guess which one won that one? Tyrannosaurus. Yeah.

I'm a little bummed even though that is the one I picked. I think we know where this is going. Yeah. So we're all tied up going into the... Final? Not quite final. I called it the Triassic Jurassic Championship and the Cretaceous Championship because it's just two left from the Cretaceous and one each from the Triassic and Jurassic. It's kind of cool that a Triassic one made it. That is.

Good job, Herrerasaurus. Neither of us thought it was going to do it. Wait, was it Herrerasaurus? Yeah. Okay, yeah. All right. So if you want to vote on Herrerasaurus versus Giraffatitan and or Deinonychus versus Tyrannosaurus, you can do that at our Patreon right now through the end of Friday. Just two days to do it so that we can record for the next time and let everybody know who won. And then we'll have the championship next week.

With the final two dinosaurs dueling it out. I think we know Tyrannosaurus. I don't know. Deinonychus. Pretty cool. It could be a whole pack of Deinonychus taking down a T-Rex. We'll see. Or a cuter Deinonychus than a T-Rex. It's another possibility. Yeah. We will see.

Jumping into the news, there's a new Oviraptorosaurian dinosaur, Yuanyanglong banyan. I never realized how many syllables there are in Oviraptorosaurian. It's a bit of a tongue twister. Yeah. Now, like I said at the beginning, this one's considered to be a bit enigmatic because it has features that show that it waded in water. There were also gastroliths found that show that it ate plants. That is enigmatic. Or...

mysterious, you could say. Yeah. So it had these hip and leg features similar to modern wading birds. Parts of the hips are short and parts of the legs are long, and there's a fusion in the ankle. And then, like I said, they found gastroliths. This study was published by Mingzi Hao and others in Cretaceous Research. And the paleo art shows Yuan Yanglong on two legs with short arms, a fairly short tail, and a parrot-like beak.

though it had a much longer neck than a parrot's, and is covered in feathers. So like other over-raptorosaurian dinosaurs. Yeah. You say it enough times, it rolls off the tongue faster. Yeah. No matter how many syllables there are, you can get used to it. Yes. So Yuan Yanglong lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Miao Tu, China, found in the Miao Gou Formation. It lived in an area with rivers. Two specimens, two individuals were found,

Fossils found include a partial skull as well as parts of the skeleton, and the two individuals were found together in a small block. They were found back in the summer of 2021.

The holotype, which is the specimen that if there's future fossils found, it'll be compared to this one. And if they discover that the two specimens aren't the same genus, this one will stay the same name. Yes. We'll have to figure out what to do with the other one. So that includes part of the hips, part of the leg. It's missing most of the foot, though. Part of the shoulder and arm, though it's missing the hand, and several vertebrae and ribs.

And then the second individual has a poorly preserved but partial skull, part of the leg, it's also missing most of the foot, part of the hips, and several vertebrae. Oh, those are decent finds. Yeah. And these fossils are now in the Inner Mongolia Museum of Natural History. Nice. So this dinosaur, Yuan Yanglong, had a short, deep skull, and it's the details on the vertebrae, hips, and legs that make it distinct.

Both specimens are similar in size, and they're considered to be small in size. They're similar to avimimus, which was about five feet or one and a half meters long. And both of these individuals are considered to be adults based on their fused bones. They didn't want to do histology on them because that's destructive sampling. You got to cut into the bone to see how old they are, basically. Yeah. And I'm guessing since there's so few of them,

Although we did see a presentation at SVP a couple years ago now where they did a really in-depth CT scan on a bone and managed to count some lags using that. But I haven't seen it replicated in any other papers. Maybe it's something that we'll see more in a few years from now. Yeah. And I think they needed a pretty powerful, specialized scanner. You couldn't just stick it in any run-of-the-mill scanner from what I recall. Mm-hmm.

They might not have one in Inner Mongolia. Oh, I'm not sure. Maybe that's a future research thing. Yeah. So they found that based on it having shorter hips, it probably wasn't a fast runner. Although the muscle attaching area might not correlate to muscle strength. So it's possible that it still could have run fast. But when you have that with the long legs...

And the shorter hips, which are seen in wading birds, they think maybe this was a wading dinosaur. Hmm. Like Spinosaurus. Maybe. The idea of Oviraptorosaurs being waders hasn't really caught on because there's no direct dietary evidence. Like their short snouts just make it harder to eat fish.

We're also missing the feet and muscle-attaching areas on the femur, on the leg bones, so it's hard to know more about its lifestyle. Although, like I said, the gastroliths, they found this cluster of smooth and sub-rounded gastroliths inside the rib cage, which is promising when it's inside the rib cage that it was actually there. Most of them are 2-3 millimeters in diameter, pretty small, and they seem to be part of the gastric mill, meaning they helped grind up food.

Yeah, because if they found those pebbles outside the ribcage, it's more likely that it was just random stones that happened to be in the rock because there's all sorts of stones in rock. In fact, when you're digging up fossils, there's frequently the question of, is that a rock or is that a fossil? Yes. It's doubly so with gastroliths. Is that a gastrolith or is that a regular rock? It's very hard to tell. Yes. So clues like being in the ribcage really help.

Now for the genus name, Yuan Yang Long, Yuan Yang in Mandarin Chinese means lovebirds. And it quote, according to the paper, symbolizes living in pairs forever, referring to the paired individuals in one block. So again, another Romeo, Juliet type specimens. And then Long means dragon.

The species name Bainien means 100 years and commemorates, quote, exactly 100 years from the initial erection of the original Oviraptorosaurus species. And those were named by Osborne in 1924, Kyrostenotes and Oviraptor. Now, this paper did come out in 2024. Like I said, we're catching up. So it's been 101 years now. They named it when it was 100 years. Yeah.

And I think it was very good mentioning the Romeo and Juliet dinosaurs because those were also, what was the really long version of it? Oviraptorosauromorphs, is that what you said? Oviraptorosaurian dinosaurs. Yes.

Something about those Oviraptorosaurians. Maybe we can come up with a shorter way to say that. A lot of times it's Oviraptorosaurids or Oviraptorids or something like that. But that's more of a specific genus or a specific clade. So if you want to make it a little broader, then you have to add like a morph or extra syllables with Ian at the end. It starts to become quite a tongue twister. It does. Well, that's a cool one. Yeah, I like that one.

Especially cool, even though it's not a sauropod. Yeah, wading birds are very interesting, wading dinosaurs. I was thinking as you were describing the features of it that made it look like a wading bird, that those don't really apply to Spinosaurus, right? Because it's longer legs, basically. Yeah, where Spinosaurus has the stumpier legs. It does. But then I was thinking on an absolute scale...

Spinosaurus had long legs, you know, several feet long, maybe five, six feet long. I'm not sure exactly from the heel to the hip. Kind of like how T-Rex did have long arms, just not in proportion to its body. Yeah. Yeah. They're like as long as our arms roughly, but yeah, compared to its body, they don't look that impressive. So maybe it was waiting, but I wonder if any of the people that talk about it being a swimmer ever say what's with those stumpy legs because wading animals tend to have long legs.

I'm sure there's going to be many, many papers on Spinosaurus. Yeah. I mean, it definitely makes sense, right? Because if you have longer legs, that means you can explore out farther into the water for plucking up fish and you're not stuck just right next to where the water meets the land. Yeah, that's a good point. Maybe we'll bring it up next time we talk to a Spinosaurus expert. What do you think about wading over raptorosaurians? Yeah, they have long legs. Yeah.

All the modern wading dinosaurs have long legs proportionally. I feel like we might be starting something that we can't back up. It's true. Well, we will move on to sauropods in just a moment with our dinosaur of the day. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors.

This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College, and their summer dig and lab programs are now open. With limited space. Yes. And you can dig at sites from both the Jurassic and Triassic. Yeah, the Jurassic site has some huge named dinosaurs in it. There's Allosaurus, the massive carnivore with impressive claws to match its bite.

There's also Gargoylosaurus, or a close relative, an ankylosaur with an impressive armor shield above its hips. Something even ankylosaurus.

Probably didn't have. And there's Diplodocus, or a close relative, the sauropod famous for their long necks and even longer tails. The whip-like tails. Yeah. I keep saying, or a close relative, because these are still partially embedded in rock and need to be excavated out. That's what you can join to help with. And we won't know for sure which dinosaurs they are or if they're a new dinosaur until they're fully excavated and prepared in a lab where you can get into all the details of the dinosaurs.

There are even more dinosaurs in the field that you might see out there. So you might get to be the one to remove enough rock so that it can be identified or so that it can be fully excavated out of the ground. That would be so cool. Yeah. So go to cncc.edu slash dino dig. You get all the details and register online by May 31st. Again, that's cncc.edu slash dino dig.

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At Georgetown SCS, the learning never stops, and neither do you. Write your next chapter. Be continued at scs.georgetown.edu slash podcast. And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Foo-Wyongasaurus, which was a request from PaleoMike716 via our Patreon and Discord, so thank you.

It was a titanosaur that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Thailand, found in the Sao Kua formation. And it looked like a typical sauropod, meaning it walked on all fours with the columnar legs and it had the long neck and tail and a small head.

For a sauropod, it was medium-sized, about 49 to 66 feet long or 15 to 20 meters long. And it's estimated to weigh 17 metric tons. Yeah. Which is decent, just compared to other sauropods. It's funny that it's medium-sized now, because that's not that far off from something like brontosaurus.

It's like we just know of these really big titanosaurs. Yes, Argentinosaurus. Yeah. Things like that. Patico Titan. And some of the Diplodocids are just so long that 60 feet doesn't sound that impressive, but.

Yeah, still big, 17 tons, much bigger than anything that walks today by a wide margin. It might not sound that impressive, but if you were to be standing next to it in a museum, it would feel impressive compared to a human. They could probably set it up in one of those ways where you can walk under its belly. Yeah.

So Foo-Wee-Yong-asaurus had slender, peg-like teeth. The height of the teeth was about four times larger than the width of the base of the tooth. Okay, yeah. Very slender. It also had 13 neck vertebrae, neck bones. The fossils were first found in the Foo-Wee-Yong National Park in 1982, and it took several years to excavate and prepare. And they found multiple specimens over time.

The holotype is a partial skeleton. It includes neck bones, back bones, ribs, a tail bone, parts of the shoulder and left arm, hips, thigh bones, and a left shin bone. But the holotype was only about 10% of the skeleton. It was later fossils that were found that helped fill in the gaps. The first fossils for Foo-Wangasaurus were found in a Thai-French expedition. And then in 1993...

So a little more than 10 years later, the site where the fossils were found was reopened and two more vertebrae were found from the back and the tail. And then in 1998, a team found a partial skeleton with part of the skull bones.

And more partial skeletons and bones were found. So now we know about 65% of this sauropod skeleton. Wow. Pretty good. That's really good for a sauropod. A lot of times it's just like a couple leg bones or some vertebrae. Yeah. Not 65%. That's very good.

What's really cool is the most complete skeleton, it's only about half grown, it's a sub-adult, but it's about 60% complete. And it includes a partial skull. Wow, so that 65% isn't just a composite of like five of them. Yeah. You get to 60% with just one. Yes, and then you fill in the gaps and then you also see what's similar. It's good. And all those other individuals get you another 5%. So they know based on this 60% complete one,

That it's a subadult because it has some unfused bones. And they were able to compare those bones, those same bones, to the larger bones in the holotype which are fused. So it helps to have the same bones of multiple specimens. Yeah, that's nice. No fully grown individuals have been found. None found with evidence that their growth stopped. So that means none of them have been found that reached their maximum body size. Okay.

That's why there's such a big error bars on how big it was, despite being so complete. They're trying to extrapolate to how big it got. And they're like, well, maybe it would have gotten 15 to 20 meters when it was fully grown. Could be.

What's also really cool about Foo-Wyongasaurus is that baby Foo-Wyongasaurus bones have been found. And there's one study that did histology on a number of arm and leg bones, the humeri and femora, to study the growth series between the babies up to the subadults. And again, histology is where you cut into the bones and you can learn a lot. They cut into the bone on a number of arm and leg bones of different sizes and ages to see how fast this sauropod grew. And the hatchlings grew fast.

up to one-third to one-quarter of their adult size. Oh, wow. But then as juveniles, they grew more slowly, and then they kept growing even after reaching sexual maturity. Nice. I didn't realize that there were actual good specimens that showed that. Yeah. I always thought that was a little bit more speculative in terms of how modern animals that rely on their scale grow, the really quick growths.

Get as big as possible so you're less likely to get eaten. Yes. Yes, that does seem to be the sauropod way. Yeah. And just for reference, it's estimated that they reach sexual maturity between the ages of 10 and 15, and then they would have kept growing. Similar to humans. Except humans...

Don't grow much longer after that. Yeah, we have sort of a logarithmic growth. So we grow the fastest in the beginning too, but just not at all the same scale. They put on like a lifetime of human's weight. It's like a month or something. Yes. It's their best defense. It is. There was a 2023 study of the skull, the endocast, that found similarities with early branching titanosaurs. So that's pretty cool. Now, the type species...

of this sauropod is Fooiangosaurus syrinthornae. It was formally named in 1994, though it was described in a press release, and it was described and named by Valerie Martin, Eric Buffetta, and Varavud Sutithorn.

The species name is in honor of Princess Mahashakri Sirindhorn of Thailand, who had an interest in the geology and paleontology of Thailand. Nice. I feel like we knew that. Yeah, she's come up a few times because of her interest in paleontology. That's great. It is. And the genus name Foo-wee-ung-asaurus, that refers to Foo-wee-ung district where the fossils were found. So it means Foo-wee-ung lizard.

What's really cool about this is it was the first sauropod named from Thailand, and it lived in a humid subtropical climate with two distinct seasons. Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include unidentified sauropods, carcharodontosaurids, the ornithomimosaur, kinarimimus, spinosaurs, and a couple of megaraptorans. And other animals that lived around the same time and place include crocodilians, turtles, fish, and sharks.

Nice. I guess sharks are fish, but it's cool to separate them out. Sometimes I forget about how significant Thailand is in paleontological terms because it's so lush, right? And when you think of paleontology, you think of deserts and places where you can find bones sticking out of the dirt. Badlands. Yeah, where they're not covered in trees and lots of living things that bury stuff like that. But I guess if you have a princess that's interested in geology, it doesn't hurt to find some things. Yeah, that's great.

For our fun fact, we're keeping it with sauropods. Well, kind of. It's that we can thank dinosaurs, and it's probably specifically sauropods, for our fruit today. Probably sauropods, huh? Yeah. Well, okay, maybe not definitively on dinosaurs. I'll get into it. But there's a new study that looked at how large dinosaurs, like sauropods, were quote-unquote ecosystem engineers. Mm-hmm.

Inadvertently, most likely. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense because they would knock down trees, eat lots of plants. This study was done by Christopher Doty and others in paleontology. And the dinosaurs knocking down the trees and eating the plants means that forests weren't as dense in their time. And plants could get by with having smaller seeds. And the smaller seeds meant there wasn't as much fruit.

So kind of calling back to our recent plant and fungi episode, dinosaurs. So after the dinosaurs went extinct, the forest grew back thicker. And that means that the sun didn't reach the ground as much. Because you had that massive canopy at the top. Yeah. And this eventually led to plants producing larger seeds and fruits growing bigger. How is that? Well, there was more competition for sunlight, which meant that the trees had to grow taller and faster. Right.

And it helped if the trees came from larger seeds because then they would have a bigger head start. And then growing fruit also helped them because animals were more likely to eat the fruit and poop out the seeds, otherwise known as dispersing. They're spreading out the seeds. Yep. And they just sort of come in a little compost pile on the way out. Yeah. As long as they don't get digested. And then eventually fruit became an important food source for a lot of animals. Yeah, like apes. Yes. Including humans. Yes. Yeah.

They're still important today. So for this study, the team built a model that replicated tropical forests of the early Paleocene, which had small animals and small seeds, and the Holocene, which had small animals and large seeds. And then they modeled light levels based on data from fossil leaves.

They did say, quote, our model is a drastic simplification and there are many remaining uncertainties, but we show that ecological dynamics can explain seed size trends without adding external factors such as climate change, end quote. So in the model, they found that the denser forests led to bigger seeds. But then about the end of the Eocene, about 33 million years ago, the seeds started getting smaller.

Land animals at that time got large enough to have a similar effect on forests the way that dinosaurs did, even though they didn't get nearly as big as the dinosaurs. They were making things more open so more sunlight was reaching the ground and then there was no longer pressure for the seeds to be large in order to succeed. Also interestingly, about 50,000 years ago, another extinction event wiped out large animals like mammoths and forests got more dense again and the model predicts seeds getting bigger over the long term.

That is interesting. But it sounds like sauropods prevented fruit from evolving while they were alive. A little bit. So we have them to thank for modern fruit in that they prevented other fruit from evolving, and then I don't really see how they helped.

They just did. Okay. We would have slightly different fruit if it wasn't for sauropods preventing fruit from evolving for millions of years. Yes. Anyway, humans, us humans are currently the ecosystem engineers. We've made fruit really big. Mm-hmm.

But also, we've been clearing a lot of land. Yep. Changing landscapes. Clearing off the animals that clear the forest so they can get denser. Well... Because that 50,000 year ago extinction might be a little related to humans potentially. I think we talked about in our I Know Paleo Mammoth episode that yes and no, but not so much. Not guaranteed. We weren't the only factor. Yeah. And it might have been a small factor. Well, anyway, the way I choose to see it, long story short...

Thanks dinosaurs for the delicious fruit today. I guess so. You could, I will give you that if it wasn't for birds distributing seeds, we might not have the same, you know, as good a fruit. So maybe modern dinosaurs play a role too in today's fruit. Well, okay. They played a role back then. And if they hadn't, who knows what would have happened? It's true.

Well, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you so much for listening. If you want more information on the stories we talked about or want to read the sources for yourself, head over to our show notes at inodino.com. Stay tuned. Next week, we'll have our annual April Fools or April Fowls episode. So you can guess what that's going to be about. Thanks for listening. And until next time. Watch me walk on my dinosaurs.