Shownotes Transcript
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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 538th episode, we're doing another round of dinosaurs on trial. Yes. Don't worry, we also have some news, including a new fast-running dinosaur, Jara Cursor. It's a cool name. Yes, and it's fitting because it originally had a different name, so you could say it's on trial with
with the new name, maybe. Kind of. That might be a stretch. We also have Dinosaur of the Day Neurosaurus, which is an informally named dinosaur, which could be another dinosaur on trial if you want to look at it that way. A lot of bonus trials happening. Yes. And we have our fun fact, which is that there might be a new digging theropod dinosaur, or maybe it's a turtle.
I'll save my turtle jokes for later. Yes. But before we get into that, we just want to mention real quick that Mother's Day is coming up.
Our ultimate dinosaur gift guide could come in handy if you're looking for gifts to give out to the mothers in your life. Yeah, or if you are a mother and you're trying to drop some hints for what someone could give you. Yes. We have updated it a bit since the holiday season, so you can take a look. It's at bit.ly slash ikd-giftguide.
There are a lot of gifts on there for all sorts of occasions and preferences. Yes. It's never a bad time to get a dinosaur gift. It isn't. And speaking of gifts too, we also have a gift we'll be giving to our patrons. If you're at the Tyrannosaurus tier or above, you
Between now and the end of May 2025, we will be sending you a signed copy of our National Geographic kids book, I Know Dino. There's the exclamation mark again. I feel like I have to say it that way.
So yeah, just make sure that if you want to sign copy, you are at the Tyrannosaurus tier or above by the end of this month and that your mailing address is up to date. And we just want to say a big thank you to all of our patrons, all of our supporters. And the Tyrannosaurus tier is kind of our book tier. So it felt fitting to be able to offer this. And we wanted to give something special to those of you who've been there for a while and to those who might be considering upgrading or joining.
Yeah. And speaking of our patrons, we have two new patrons to thank this week and they are Patrick and Maximum Goblin. Thank you both for joining. Then rounding out our shout outs, we've got Evelyn and Frankie, Jeff, Wouter, Ellen, Ermal, Zoe Visoris, Taylor, and Matthew. Amazing. Again, thank you so much to all our Dinoadals. We really appreciate you.
We also have one quick announcement. There's a lot of stuff going on in this episode before we get to the meat of it. We will be switching the format of our show soon, around the middle of this month, we're looking at, to a biweekly format. Or, well, mostly biweekly format. It was something that we experimented with while we were on our parental leave, and it looks like, according to our listener survey, you didn't mind. Yeah.
And if you haven't noticed, it's been a little bit difficult for us to keep up with the weekly schedule. Sometimes rather than episodes coming out on Wednesday, they come out on Thursday. I think last week I might have even missed Thursday by a few minutes, so it might have technically been on Friday. Oops. Which is not what we want to do. We want to be a little more consistent and not just behind all the time. Yeah. Plus the episodes have been getting a little shorter in
in some cases, which we know a lot of people like longer episodes. And if we go bi-weekly, it should be easier for us to do longer episodes. Yes, we can really go down those Eryctodromeus burrows on the episodes going on a bi-weekly format. We're going to be doing things a little bit different too, where we'll have news in the episodes, but we will also be mixing it up where if you're on our Patreon, you'll be able to vote for topics.
Oh, yeah. So some of the episodes will be based on votes. Other ones will be based on news. We'll still have some interviews and interviews.
occasionally we will be releasing extra episodes in general, you know, like little dino bites. I think you were talking about calling over something like that. So it won't always just be biweekly, but for the most part. Well, if you're a patron, we'll be posting more regularly bonus exclusive content and early access content. Yeah, we'll try to fill in as many of those off weeks as possible using Patreon between the I Know Paleo episodes and then extra news and things like that.
Because it's a little bit easier to put stuff up on Patreon without worrying about it being perfect and getting all the blog posts and all of these extra things ready. So hopefully that solution works pretty well. Yes. So now jumping into the news, I know you're all looking forward to dinosaurs on trial, but we have a new dinosaur. We can't just not talk about the new dinosaur. So there's a new ornithomimid dinosaur, Jara Cursor bisectensis.
This was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Alexander Averinov and Hans Sues or Hans Dieter Sues. Yeah, but when we talked to him, he said he wanted to just be Hans. Yes, but all the papers I've been reading from him lately have his name as Hans Dieter Sues. I think it's for continuity. He was saying like he can't really mix it up now because then people will be like, who's this Hans Sues guy? Everybody knows him as the full name. Do we know him well enough we can just say Hans? Sure.
He's been on the show. Yeah, and he's very easygoing. I was surprised for how prolific he is. I thought that he might have a little bit of an ego, but he really doesn't. It's a very fun interview. I think that's most paleontologists. That's true. That's probably why we like this field so much. That's fair. All right, back to the dinosaur. So being an ornithomimid,
Jara Cursor was a fast-running theropod. Ornithomimids, just as a quick refresher, they're the bird mimics. That's what that name means. And they were fast. They had small skulls, big eyes, long slender necks, toothless beaks, and long legs, which is good for running. Yep. I always think of the Gallimimus or Struthiomimus. I think it was Gallimimus in Jurassic Park. They do move in herds, and they're all like running all ostrichy. Yes.
Now this one, Jara Cursor, looked similar. Walking on two legs, it had the long tail, the short arms, the long neck, the small head, and it probably had feathers.
It's got a complicated history, but it turns out we know a lot of the bones from this dinosaur. Oh, nice. So it lived in the late Cretaceous in what is now Uzbekistan. It was found in the Bisecti Formation. See where that species name came from? Yes, Bisectensis. It was found in the same formation as the fossils in our fun fact. And actually both papers have the same author, which I didn't realize until after I...
Finished doing all the research. Both of them are Hans? No, both of them are Averianov. Oh, he's also very prolific. Yes. And the Bisecti formation has a lot of different types of dinosaurs. Some dinosaurs found there include sauropods, carcharodontosaurs, tyrannosaurs, ornithomimids, alvarosaurids, oviraptorosaurians, therizinosaurids, troodontids, and dromaeosaurids.
Also ornithopods and chylosaurs and ceratopsoids. So you've basically got all the major groups. You've got carnivores, herbivores, omnivores, all kinds of dinosaurs with all different claws and shields. I haven't really heard ceratopsoids before. Yes. But I guess broader than ceratopsids. Yep. But in this formation, ornithomimids are the most common fossils found, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
So Jara Cursor was originally considered to be Archaea or Nithomimus, question mark, Bisectensis. And it was named in 1995 by Lev Nesov. Nesov considered the Bisecti formation to be similar to the Irene Dabasu formation in Inner Mongolia and referred a few dinosaurs found in the Bisecti formation as dinosaurs found in the Irene Dabasu formation.
which includes this dinosaur, then known as Archaea ornithomimus. That was based on the ornithomimus in quotes Asiaticus from the Irene Davassu formation. Archaea ornithomimus means ancient bird mimic, and that dinosaur lived in the late Cretaceous in the Irene Davassu formation, but recently it's been considered to be a nomum dubium. Now it turns out that there are differences with
Jarakursar. In the hips and legs, there's different grooves in the bones. So that means it gets its own name. And the genus name Jarakursar refers to where the fossil was found, the locality Jarakaduk in Uzbekistan, and kursar, which means runner. So you've got Jarakaduk runner. The
The holotype is a femur. It's a thigh bone that came from a juvenile. This dinosaur was named based on parts of the skull and isolated bones from the body from multiple individuals. And then more specimens have been found from multiple individuals, including parts of the skull, neck, back and tail bones, parts of the hips, the arms, and legs. There's actually several hundred isolated bones. Wow, that's a lot. Yes. And these bones have been described before by the same authors.
What's cool is they show some growth in individual variation. So it looks different based on the individuals and based on how it was growing or where along the growth series it was. The femur, the thigh bone, might have medullary bone. That's bone tissue found in female birds about to lay eggs. So it can tell you if an individual was female. So this specimen, this holotype, could be a female specimen.
I guess we'll have to wait on the paper. Yeah. If there is one. Oh, specifically for the medullary bone. Yeah. Which I don't know, but these two authors are so prolific that maybe. Yeah. I really liked the medullary bone thing. Yeah.
We don't really think about it with humans and mammals because we don't lay eggs and we don't have any medullary bone that varies with where you are in the ovulation cycle. But with birds and dinosaurs, it could be such a useful way to figure out this sexual dimorphism because people are constantly proposing it and wondering, well, is this one a male? Is this one a female? Are they different species? Are they different genera? But if you have that
medullary bone and you see that like every one of them that we say is this species is female it might help you elucidate some of those questions yeah but the medullary bone thing i think is still a little bit controversial because it's fossilized and it's gone through 100 million years ish of changes so identifying it positively as medullary bone is a little bit tricky still yes
But it's like all these things with paleontology, there are new tools, new techniques coming out, things that get us closer to finding out what's what. Yeah. I do think eventually we'll be able to definitively say, or as close to definitively as you can say with paleontology, that at least some of the medullary bone is in fact medullary bone. Mm-hmm.
One other cool thing about gyracursor is it's one of the oldest known ornithomimids in Asia that's been found so far. That's cool. Extra archaeo ornithomimus. And we'll get into our dinosaurs on trial in just a moment. But first, we're going to pause for a quick sponsor break.
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All right. The segment you've all been waiting for. Hopefully. Hopefully. Since the end of 2023, because that was the last time we did this, was episode 473. And, you know, go on. We'll wait for you to listen to it. Just kidding. I thought you were talking to me for a second. No. You can always pause this and listen to it. I think this version is going to be better, though.
Well, we got some great suggestions from our patrons on how to improve it. So we're trying it out and I'm excited. So yeah, after a long hiatus, Dinosaurs on Trial is back. But this time around, you had to be a patron to make your accusation. And we got a lot of great ones, which we'll be splitting up over multiple episodes. Maybe not consecutive episodes, but we will get to them.
And we want to thank everyone who participated. Yeah, we got some really good suggestions. Yes. And since we're doing this on a rolling basis, if you're a patron, feel free to add your accusation. Yeah, there's a Patreon post you can comment on. Yes. It's called Dinosaurs on Trial is Coming Back. And it's coming back again and again. Well, hopefully. If people really hate this, then maybe it won't. But I presume people might like it, hopefully. You let us know. So how this will work.
One of us will either be the prosecutor or defender. That just depends on the accusation made. And we'll each make our case. And then it's up to you, listener, to vote on our Patreon for whether the dinosaur is innocent or guilty. And then we'll share the votes in our next episode. Yeah. One of the things I really liked about the suggestions too is that they are very specific. It's not... Most of them aren't like, T-Rex wasn't that cool. It's stuff like...
in this exact scenario in this movie or documentary this thing was in the wrong so there's more to dive into and it's a little more fun but I do want to say because we're doing this like a debate
It doesn't mean that what we're saying is necessarily what we believe. We're just choosing a side. Yes. And so the evidence that we present might be slanted a little bit in our favor and not necessarily the scientific consensus. So if you're listening to this and you're like, wait, I didn't know that that happened. You have to take what we're saying with a grain of salt. Yeah.
I try. I mean, nothing we say is crazy misleading. We're not just like making up scientific studies that didn't happen. But yeah, we might present things as a little bit more certain in our favor than they may or may not be. Just being a good prosecutor or a good defender. So we'll start with the accusation from Displetosaurus Horneri, who said,
I accuse walking with dinosaurs and Kylosaurus of cruelty to two Tyrannosaurus babies because it mortally wounded their mother for refusing to abandon them.
Did you rewatch that scene from Walking with Dinosaurs like I did? I sure did. Had to know what I was getting into here. So as the prosecutor, well, first I'll just give a little background. This scene appears in the last episode of Walking with Dinosaurs called Death of a Dynasty. And
I will say, the Ankylosaurus acts aggressively. It just picks a fight with T-Rex, who is caught off guard from watching her chicks being a good mother. And the heavily armored Ankylosaurus cracks the T-Rex's femur and ruptures internal organs. And for what? The Rex wasn't trying to attack it. It wasn't even threatening it. It didn't even notice it at first. So is this all for kicks and giggles? Kicks and giggles. Yeah.
Yes. And now the two chicks are alone and confused and they wait for hours for their mother to wake up and feed them. And they can't even feed themselves yet. It's just so cruel.
That's definitely a take. So I think it's interesting that you're presenting T-Rex as this friendly animal where we have evidence of T-Rex biting each other's faces and biting into all sorts of animals. They're clearly not these helpless victims, but it's
In terms of this specific interaction, I will say the video evidence clearly shows ankylosaurus slowly walking through the brush when it comes upon a T-Rex. And despite the narrator slandering the ankylosaurus, describing its quote-unquote very little brain, it does wiggle its tail toward the T-Rex in a pretty, I would say, intelligent display.
But to that end of warning the T-Rex, would you blame a rattlesnake for biting someone after clearly rattling its tail and then not retreating? I don't think so. The narrator also says, quote, normally the T-Rex would retreat, but she would not abandon her young, end quote. And I call this a false narrative because the young were in no danger. The ankylosaurus
didn't even show that it acknowledged they were there and chylosaurus doesn't have that great of a sense of vision or smell so i don't think back to that very little brain maybe but i don't think that ankylosaurus even knew they were there and all the t-rex had to do was walk away and lead her babies to safety even a baby t-rex is faster than ankylosaurus so it's not like the
the T-Rex had to stay there and fight. I think the T-Rex was being belligerent. And most importantly, when the Ankylosaurus turned around as if to leave, the T-Rex was the one that lunged to bite the Ankylosaurus. There was no backward advancing by the Ankylosaurus. So basically what happened is the T-Rex tried to get a bite in and got a broken leg for messing with the wrong dinosaur.
But how was the T-Rex to know the Ankylosaurus was walking away? We all know that Ankylosaurus uses its tail as a weapon. But why, if the T-Rex is just defending its babies, is it rushing towards the Ankylosaurus, facing it weapons first, and not just backing up to protect its babies?
Trying to scare it away, perhaps. Like, this is my territory. These are my babies. Go away. Maybe it was. We'll have to let the voters decide. Isn't that what we're doing? We're going to put up a poll? Yes, we are going to put up a poll. So you let us know what you think. On our Patreon. And the poll is open to everyone. So if you want to vote, feel free to go there. Tell us what you think.
Although maybe on Patreon you can't vote unless you're a free member. I'm not sure. You do have to be a member, but you can be a free member. All right, next up we've got from Paul B. Quote, I accuse compsignathids of falsifying data by pretending to exist. Dun, dun, dun. I'll be the prosecutor again. This is a good callback to our bonus segment on Patreon. Why are theropods so strange? Spoilers, they're not. It has to do with nursery clades.
And Andrea Cao's framework is all I need to cite here, because Cao went through 20 years of data and analysis and found that compsignathids did not exist and that they're an artificial group. And
Just for giving you a visual here, Compsognathids or Compsognathids, they were those small carnivorous dinosaurs that looked pretty bird-like and they lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous and they walked on two legs. They had short arms and long tails. The Compies in Jurassic Park? Yes. That's if you consider Compies or Compsognathids to be not an artificial group. Okay.
We get into all the details in our bonus segment, but the gist is that Comsignathids aren't Comsignathids. Instead, all dinosaurs classified as Comsignathids are juvenile versions of other theropods. And they got split when they should have been lumped because of biases in the data over time. And that happens when you're focusing on details only found in adults when classifying dinosaurs. So as an example, after going through all the data, it turns out that Comsignathids...
the compsignathid compsignathus is actually a megalosauroid, according to the paper. And according to you. Oh, yes. So in defense of the compsignathids,
I will grant you that not all small dinosaurs are truly unique genera and some are misclassified juveniles. And the current majority opinion that Nanotyrannus is a juvenile T-Rex is a good example of that being a real thing. There's also Jack Horner's TED Talk, Where Are the Baby Dinosaurs?, which I think might be one of the most popular dinosaur talks ever. It has so many views. People talk about it with us all the time.
And he goes through several dinosaurs like Dracorex and Stygimoloch being young Pachycephalosaurus. This hypothesis is so well accepted that if you try to go to the Wikipedia page for Dracorex or Stygimoloch, you get redirected to Pachycephalosaurus.
which is pretty strong favor by a consensus of editors. Are you just making my point for me? No, I'm going to steer the point because on the other hand, he also talks about Taurosaurus being a fully grown Triceratops, an idea which is much less widely accepted. The big difference between those is the number of them in the fossil record. We have way more Triceratops than we do Pachycephalosaurus, so it's an easier mistake to make.
But Pachycephalosaurids are estimated to be only 1% of the Hell Creek population. Meanwhile, Ceratopsids are estimated to be about 40 to 60% of the population, which is a huge number. So with such a large number of fossils, it's hard to believe that we wouldn't have better evidence of a transitional individual between Triceratops and Taurosaurus.
So how about compsignathids? It is possible that some compsignathids are misclassified babies, maybe, but compsignathids itself is basically only known from two specimens, and one is much larger than the other, so it could be considered a juvenile and an adult, which is a way that it has been considered for over 100 years.
But the biggest issue for me is the distribution in the fossil record. All of the compsignathids that we have are from the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous. If they are juvenile theropods, where are the compsignathids from the Triassic? Where are the compsignathids from the early Jurassic? And especially where are the compsignathids from the late Cretaceous for which we have the best fossil record? Just bias in the fossil preservation. But people have collected them from the...
late Jurassic and early Cretaceous. It could be. Well, they're small because they're babies. And the smaller dinosaurs tend not to be found as often because...
In the past, people look for the bigger bones. But we do have small dinosaurs from the late Cretaceous, just not Comsignathus. Right. And we do have baby dinosaurs from the late Cretaceous, too. I was going to say, it could be a mix of the way they got preserved or didn't get preserved and how dinosaurs are getting excavated. As for the two specimens, one being larger than the other, there are many, many papers talking about how you can't use that for age. But...
What's more likely, that Comsignathids are babies and we just don't have any babies? Because the groups that they include are like Tyrannosaurids. We have so many Tyrannosaurids from the late Cretaceous, and we don't have any Comsignathids. So if Comsignathids are baby Tyrannosaurs, then where are they? It's more likely that they just went extinct in the middle of the Cretaceous, and that's why we don't have them in the late Cretaceous. Maybe. We will leave it to the voters to decide. Yeah.
Yeah, if the question was, Comsignathus is pretending to exist, I think it'd be an easier sell. But all of Comsignathus? We'll reveal what everyone thinks in the next episode. Next up, we've got Steve T-Rex, who suggested...
I accuse Tyrannosaurus of throwing the contest against Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park 3. No way with T-Rex's much stronger bite that she, parentheses around the S because we don't really know, should have lost the fight. I guess all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were supposed to be female. So it is probably a she. Unless it's one of those frog DNA mutated ones.
So I think that something was clearly up with this fight. I agree with Steve T-Rex. You're the prosecutor this time. Yes. The T-Rex bite force was powerful enough to bite through just about any unarmored and even some armored dinosaurs.
That Tyrannosaurus had its mouth fully around the Spinosaurus neck for six seconds straight and didn't seem to do any damage at all. There isn't even like the slightest bit of blood dripping down its neck for six seconds. It seems so long. You count it? Yeah, I went back and I was like, how long does it? I didn't remember it being this long. I thought it was like a little bite and then Spinosaurus somehow squirmed out of it immediately. They're like thrashing all over the place with T-Rex with the mouth chomped around the neck.
And then it even lets go for a second and rebites the Spinosaurus for a couple more seconds around the neck. And I think the only logical explanation is that T-Rex, for some reason, didn't bite down as hard as it could. Because if it had, it would have very easily at least drawn blood. Like, what is going on there?
For the rest of the fight too, the T-Rex is more focused on roaring and sort of dancing around than actually fighting. Seems like a boxer throwing a fight. But if you're going to say, oh, the T-Rex just couldn't fight that hard, I will say when we first see the T-Rex, it was not weak from hunger because it had just eaten a bunch of meat judging by the state of the dinosaur carcass that it looked up from.
It looks up at them from over it. I don't know if you remember. Oh, yeah. And it's got blood all around its face because it'd been digging in there and getting a nice good meal. And clearly its jaw is working fine because it was chewing on all that stuff. So I don't know why it threw the fight, but clearly if it wanted to win, it could have won. Now, there was a fun back and forth between Steve T-Rex and Richard on this one. And so I'm just going to mention some of the things they mentioned.
To borrow from Richard, yes, Spinosaurus was genetically engineered to be adaptable, meaning it could hunt on land and in water. It had an extra strong neck, extra powerful jaws. Maybe it was even created to take down its competitor T-Rex because in this world it was an illegally bred dinosaur, so it's unclear of its exact genetic makeup. And to quote from Steve T-Rex, who accused Spinosaurus of taking performance-enhancing substances...
So Spinosaurus was bold and did cross into the Rex's territory. So the T-Rex was caught off guard and maybe those substances made it more aggressive. And it became, as Richard said, a steroidosaurus or a steroidosaurus. Now, the two of them probably had run-ins before and the Rex knew it would have to strike first or things could get ugly. And of course they did.
And just last, in addition to why T-Rex would want to throw the fight, we don't know, if anything, too, T-Rex would want to defend its name as the Tyrant King. Why lose that title? One would think. I don't think we have to decide why.
why it would throw the fight, just that it's most likely that it did throw the fight. Just doesn't make sense that it would if it ends in death. I will note that you didn't present any evidence that Spinosaurus had like an extra strong armored neck,
Or anything like that. Because to me, that's the only explanation you could have for why Spinosaurus didn't get at least bleed from being bitten by T-Rex. And you can see its neck. It looks like a regular scaly Jurassic Park dinosaur neck. Oh, but it might be an extra strong neck since it was genetically engineered.
but the skin looked normal. And if anything, it seems like all of these dinosaurs they make extra strong, like you were saying, extra more powerful everything, including the T-Rex. We saw the T-Rex biting through all sorts of stuff in other movies. So I don't see how it can bite through a chain, but it can't bite through a Spinosaurus meaty neck. Doesn't make sense. Wow.
Again, leaving it up to the voters to decide if it threw the fight. All right. Our next suggestion is from Ryan, the biochemist who said, I accused Tyrannosaurus of shamelessly hunting a herd of chasmosaurs using F-14s as a weapon. This comes from a Calvin and Hobbes comic.
And I will say, it's right there in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Why would Bill Watterson make that up? We all know that all dinosaur comics are factual. Otherwise, why would the paleo community use the term thagomizer for Stegosaurus Club? The Farsight cartoon is clearly historically accurate, just like this F-14 flying Tyrannosaurus. Now I know why you made that disclaimer in the beginning of this segment. Yeah.
Well, I will say, let's look at the F-14 first. It's got two tandem seats in the cockpit, which would be so uncomfortable for a Tyrannosaurus that needs all the space it can get. And it was hard to find the exact dimensions of an F-14, but the full F-14 is almost 63 feet or over 19 meters long. And it's got two tandem seats in the cockpit, which would be so uncomfortable for a Tyrannosaurus that needs all the space it can get.
One sketch I found estimates the cockpit size where the T-Rex would sit is about 11 feet or 3.3 meters long. Now, T-Rex could grow up to about 42 feet or 13 meters long, so it wouldn't fit. That's just simple math. And I also contend T-Rex would have gotten motion sick.
Well, I think that T-Rex having the biggest eyes of any animal ever to walk the earth would have had excellent vision and been good as a fighter pilot because we all know that vision is extremely important and you can't be a fighter pilot with glasses. But also, we don't know that this was a full-size T-Rex. This could have been a baby T-Rex. It could be one of those child soldier types. Sad. It's a rough world for a dinosaur. Sometimes they got to get into it young. Maybe.
It doesn't look like a juvenile T-Rex to me, though. Because of a big head. But again, we will leave it up to the voters to decide. And our last one is from Richard and from Benedoplodocus. Richard accuses Oviraptor of being an egg thief and just pretending to be a good parent, whereas Benedoplodocus says that it is a falsely accused egg thief.
So we're going to go on the Richard route and I'm going to be prosecuting saying that it was an egg thief and Sabrina will be defending over Raptor.
So I will say for Oviraptor, it's right there in the name. Ovum is egg. Raptor is thief. So it's an egg thief. Wiping my hands. Because names are always accurate. In this case, it is. Also, thieves are known for being sneaky. So of course, when faced with a threat, they would pretend to have ownership of something which they are stealing.
And another thing is, because they love eggs so much, if something like a sand dune was going to collapse on them, of course they would try to protect their food so they could eat it later. It doesn't necessarily mean that they wanted the eggs to hatch like a caring parent would, because that's how they're fossilized, sort of over them. But I know what you're going to say. Well, there are embryos in those eggs that look a lot like the parents. And I will say dinosaurs are well-documented cannibals, so they...
Could just be cannibalizing another Oviraptor's nest. I wouldn't say well-documented. There's Majungasaurus off the top of my head. Allosaurus. Okay. Different types of dinosaurs. They're all theropods. But not... All those beast feet. There were some theropods that were herbivores, so I don't think that works. They're not that closely related. These aren't the herbivore ones, though. Well, I'm taking the side of...
Bennett Diplodocus as the defender. I'm saying it's all a big misunderstanding because, sure, the name means egg thief, but the man who named Oviraptor even said in the paper that named it, quote, the generic and specific names of this animal, Oviraptor, signifying the egg Caesar, Philoceratops signifying fondness for ceratopsian eggs, may entirely mislead us as to its feeding habits and belie its character, end quote. May.
Well, if the guy who's naming it is saying this could all be a misunderstanding, I think that says something. He thought it could be. Also, since Oviraptor was named, which it was named way back in 1924, a lot of new evidence has come to light to show that Oviraptor was in fact not an egg thief, but rather a caring parent, which here we get to the embryos you mentioned. Because in the 1990s, paleontologists found Oviraptor's close relative,
Chidi Potti on top of nests and in one of the eggs was an embryo and that helped them identify that the nest probably belonged to Chidi Potti. An Oviraptor was also found on top of a nest, so it seems more likely that it was keeping its eggs warm until they hatched rather than trying to steal them.
Well, it's very interesting that you say we can consider Oviraptor's character based on evidence of Chidi Potti, but we can't consider Oviraptor's character based on other theropods. Well, Chidi Potti is a close relative versus Majungasaurus and Allosaurus are much, much less closely related.
Yeah, but cannibalism is everywhere in the animal kingdom. But not with every species. Well, we'll see what the voters think.
So if you want to vote on any of these debates, I guess, duels, trials, duels is a different thing. Then you can go to patreon.com slash I know dino. And again, I guess you have to sign up for the free level so that you can't vote multiple times. That's how it keeps track of it. But anybody can vote. And we'll get into our dinosaur of the day, Neurosaurus, in just a moment. But first, we're going to pause for a quick sponsor break.
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And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Neurosaurus, which was a request from Bennett Plotikus via our Patreon and Discord. So thanks. Again, I think Neurosaurus is fitting in this episode because it's an informally named sauropod. So as a dino on trial, potentially, like, is this one valid? If it was on trial, probably not. Anyway, it's an informal sauropod dinosaur. It lived in the Cretaceous in what's now Inner Mongolia, found in the Chaganur Formation.
And it's informal because it was never named in a peer-reviewed journal. It probably looked like a typical sauropod. It walked on four columnar legs. It had a long neck, a long tail, a small head. It's been estimated to be about 82 feet or 25 meters long, which is a pretty good length. Its proposed name, again, because it's informal, is Neurosaurus chaganensis. It was proposed by Zhu Mingdong in 1992. And that name, Neurosaurus, means nerlizard.
fossils of a partial skeleton were found. They were found alongside plates and bones of a stegosaur. And its foot has a stress fracture. It's on the fourth toe of the left foot. Only Neurosaurus and an indeterminate stegosaur have been found in the Chaganoor formation so far. And you can see a replica of Neurosaurus at the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta, Georgia in the U.S. and at the Inner Mongolia Museum. Or at least I think you can. I found pictures from a few years ago, so I think it's still there.
In both places or in the Mongolian one? Both. Okay. I wonder though, at some point, maybe it'll go from being informally named to a valid dinosaur because...
There have been bones found. It just needs to get published in a peer-reviewed journal. Yeah, and need to determine for sure that the bones are unique enough for it to warrant its own genus name. Yes. But if it's the only thing, the only sauropod from the formation, as long as the age doesn't overlap with something nearby with tons of sauropods, which I guess is actually kind of likely, then it should get its own name.
So maybe one day. And hopefully the name doesn't change because that happens sometimes. But sometimes they keep it. True. Or they use it as the species name or something. Yeah, there's a nod to it somehow. And our fun fact is that there might be a new digging theropod dinosaur. Or like I said at the beginning of this episode, it might be a turtle.
Was it hiding from a sauropod? It was not. A turtle hiding from a sauropod? Nothing to do with sauropods. This was published in Palsy by Alexander Averinov, who described two fused bones from the foot. These fossils were found in the Bisecti Formation. So we've got late Cretaceous in what's now Uzbekistan.
And it's got some interesting features which aren't known in any theropods today, but have been seen in some specialized digging mammals. Oh, that's cool. It is really cool. But why I bring up it might be a turtle is because Andrea Cow wrote on their theropoda blog that they think the fossils could belong to a turtle instead.
Some reasons include the bones have a, quote, chaotic network of cavities, which suggest a substantially spongy texture instead of hollow bones. The surface of the nails rough and pitted, which is seen in many turtles but not in theropods, as well as a couple other details. But there is a counter-argument, according to a quote on the comment of the blog, that it's different from a turtle because of details like having an S-shaped curve.
But then Cal said to that commenter that turtles can have a lot of variation. So I think it'll be interesting to see if there's a peer-reviewed paper that talks about this maybe being a turtle. Because, again, this is just on a blog right now. So right now the only peer-reviewed paper is that it's a new digging theropod dinosaur. But it doesn't give it a name. It's just...
A couple of bones that look like a fused bone in a theropod and therefore maybe it was digging. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a tricky one. Yeah, I mean, it seemed like a good fit with our dinosaurs on trial because you got arguments for two different outcomes here. We could put a vote up for that one too. Bonus vote, maybe. I think we have enough votes. Yeah, that's really interesting.
I mean, that does happen a lot where it's so hard to know all of the bones for every animal. So it's easy to see something that looks similar to bones you're very familiar with and think like, oh, this is really unique for the types of animals I'm always looking at. And then somebody goes, oh, but it's really common with this group of animals over here. And so maybe it's just that. And if all you have is just like a couple foot bones or leg bones, small pieces of leg bone, you know, fused together, then...
It can be really hard to tell. Yes. And then you have the question of, well, is it, does it look extra spongy because it's a baby? Does it have that S curve because it got distorted while it was fossilizing? You know, you can go back and forth with what's more likely all day until you find more bones. Well, we'll see what happens here.
And that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Stay tuned. Next week, we're going to have another new dinosaur as well as an interview with paleo artist Franco Tempesta, who illustrated our book, I Know Dino. Yeah. It's not our usual kind of interview, though. You'll see what we mean. I'm so glad he illustrated our book. It turned out so great. Yes. Without those illustrations, I don't know. It would not be the same book at all. Well...
It would be very hard to visualize. Yeah. Don't forget to vote on dinosaurs on trial on Patreon. And if you're looking again for gifts, especially with Mother's Day coming up, head over to bit.ly slash ikd-giftguide. Thanks again. And until next time.