Was Saurophaganax an Allosaurid or a Sauropod?
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We've reached 10 years of podcasting this year. To celebrate, we're mailing Allosaurus patches to all of our dino-it-alls at the Triceratops level and up. Join by February 28th at patreon.com slash inodino to get your exclusive Allosaurus patch. 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 518th episode, we've got a bunch of news. So many new dinosaurs. There's a new sauropod with a feature that might unlock sexual dimorphism. There's a new ornithopod with wide, strong feet. New and anti-ornithine birds that were like today's birds of prey. Plus, we've got another sauropod with a tail club. Oh, nice. Yes. And we've got a couple...

Articles we're expecting to see at SVP, although they've also been published elsewhere, which is why we can talk about them, which includes a new spinosaur as well as one of people's favorite dinosaurs maybe being a nomadubium.

Oh no! Yeah. SVP is a quick reminder to our listeners that stands for Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, and they will be meeting very, very soon. So there will be a lot of stuff coming out that, unfortunately, is going to have to wait on our show a little bit. Well, as of the release of this episode, SVP will have already started, because I think it starts on Wednesday when this episode will come out. Oh, good point. But a lot of the dinosaur talks aren't until Friday and Saturday. Yes. Yes.

But this is our last episode before we go on parental leave for a little bit because we are expecting our second baby very, very soon. Any moment now. So we have, don't worry though, we recorded episodes in advance so you'll still get your dino fix. And when we come back, we will be catching up on all of the news.

Yeah. And last time we went on parental leave, actually, a lot of those episodes were more popular than the ones that had news. Maybe because we put a little more time into getting a cohesive theme around the episode. It tells a little bit more of a story arc to it. So I think they'll still be very enjoyable episodes and hopefully you all enjoy those.

But in this episode, we also have a dinosaur of the day. Yes, Dilophosaurus, which we're revisiting. That's the crested dinosaur that was made famous in Jurassic Park, though it didn't spit venom in real life. And also, we don't think had a big umbrella frill or spitting cobra frill. And our fun fact for this episode is that ants farmed fungus in the late Cretaceous. It's a bit of a tongue twister. Ants farmed fungus. Yeah. Ants farmed fungus. Ants farmed fungus. That's true.

But before we get into all of that, as always, we'd like to thank some of our patrons. And this week we have 10 patrons to thank. They are BinderClipChick, Yedit, Matthew, Fergus, Keith, Scott, Reed, Randy and Squim, Sarasaurus Rex, and Linda. Thank you so much, everybody. Yeah, like we were just talking about, we're going on parental leave soon, so we're going to be switching to bi-weekly.

Probably temporarily. But if you want more frequent content, please consider signing up for our Patreon, patreon.com slash inodino. Yes, we have a lot of stuff scheduled to go out over the coming months. And if you sign up, you may not get a shout out immediately if you're at a shout out tier because we have, as we said, pre-recorded some episodes. But we will definitely be shouting you out when we get back from our parental leave. Yes, absolutely.

Also, we'll be sending out our exclusive gift to our Spinosaurus patrons soon, so be on the lookout for an Allosaurus metal print, a signed copy of our book Keep Your Dinosaurs Here, and a special I Know Dino pen. By the time this episode's aired, we will probably have posted a picture of what to expect on our Patreon, so you can take a look. And I just want to thank our Spinosaurus patrons and all of our patrons so much for your support.

You're amazing. And for our Spinosaurus patrons, I hope you enjoy this year's gift. Yes. And I think we have an extra one or two, so you could sign up at the Spinosaurus level if you would like, and we'll send it to you too. So jumping into the news, I'm going to kick it off with the SVP abstracts. I see. Well, those are making a lot of...

I want to say memes really more than anything. They're making the rounds. Yeah. On the dinosaur subreddits. Surprisingly, the Spinosaurus one got less attention than the other article. The other one is about Saurophaganax, also known as the really big Allosaurus.

But like we said, SVP should be underway by the time this episode starts. Unfortunately, this is going to be the first SVP we're missing in the nine years since we started going to SVP, which is a bit of a bummer.

Unfortunately, doctors don't recommend flying when you're nine months pregnant. And I don't want to miss the birth of our child. So neither of us can make it this year. Yeah. And as far as I know, if there's a virtual component, it won't be until maybe next year. Yeah. Yeah. They're not doing virtual this year. Otherwise, we would do virtual like we did last time.

And it's also a bummer because it's in Minneapolis where I have a bunch of family and it would have been very nice to visit family, go to SVP around the holidays. Years ago when we found out it was going to be in Minneapolis, I was like, yes, that's the perfect place. And then the timing of pregnancy just didn't work out with it. But if you're in the Minneapolis area or you ever find yourself in that area, they do have a very good dinosaur museum and I highly recommend visiting it if you're ever there.

But since we're going to be on parental leave, I figured we'd talk about the two subjects that are already getting a lot of interest rather than waiting months until we're back. Both of these have been published elsewhere, like I already mentioned. So I'm not... You're not sharing anything you're not supposed to be sharing. Yes. So I'm going to start with the quote-unquote scimitar-crested Spinosaurus first.

So back in January 2023, Paul Cyrano wrote an article for the Chicago Tribune about a new Spinosaurus discovery in Niger, which we somehow missed. Oops. We don't subscribe to the Chicago Tribune, so that could be why. And a lot of our mailing lists focus on peer-reviewed articles. This was just an article by Paul Cyrano after he went on the trip. But in any case...

Now that the abstract has been accepted by SVP, I think it's a little more fleshed out and a little more maybe to be taken seriously in terms of its scientific rigors.

So what happened is when Cyrano and his team got to Niger, a guide showed them some pieces of a spinosaurid, specifically pieces of a jaw. Nice. And then they went into the field to find more of the dinosaur and they found the top of its skull, which they describe as, quote, a long scimitar-shaped display crest projected upward, definitive evidence that we had found a new species with a startlingly new profile, end quote.

And a scimitar or a scimitar, which is apparently the preferred pronunciation news to me, is a long curved sword that you find in the region.

In addition to the skull, they also found, quote, pointed fish-eating teeth, sections of the tall back spines, and other bones, end quote. So tall back spines, I think, is why they are referring it to Spinosaurus and not making it just a Spinosaurid. Makes sense. Because Spinosaurus, of course, has the largest, most impressive sail on its back.

A picture of the skull has quote unquote leaked, although I kind of wonder if it was originally published with the Chicago Tribune article because it has some broken image links in the article. The Wayback Machine got hacked and as a result, I can't check the original version of this article to see if the pictures were included with it.

But as Flawed Design pointed out in our Discord, it looks a lot like Cryolophosaurus. Oh, interesting. It sort of has that pompadour-like head crest, or as they put it, a scimitar portion of the skull. That definitely sounds fancier than a pompadour, like an Elvis impersonator. Mm-hmm.

But I think the most interesting thing to me, at least, is that they're calling it a species of Spinosaurus and not a new genus since it was found in Niger and not Morocco or Egypt where the existing Spinosaurus material has been named from. And it may also be a little bit later based on the formation it was found in because Spinosaurus is usually closer to 100 million years. This might be closer to 90 million years, according to the original article. So I think that's interesting.

The Spinosaurid Suchomimus was also found in Niger from about 110 to 120 million years ago before, so this isn't the first Spinosaurid material from Niger. But you should check out the pictures of the Spinosaurus because it has a very big crest on its head, bigger than Cryolophosaurus even, but sort of in the same spot. It'd be interesting to see if they draw any

conclusions about the relationships between Spinosaurus and Cryolophosaurus based on this crest. I doubt it. It doesn't seem at all related, but I guess they could...

They also mentioned in that first article, meaning the one in the Chicago Tribune, that there is a skull of a carcharodontosaur in the area as well. And also a fish that looks like a freshwater alligator gar and was likely over 10 feet long. So presumably it's from a river ecosystem. Do we have another Stromer's Riddle brewing in this area? I mean, it's basically the same place. So it would be the same Stromer's Riddle.

I think. But last but not least, they found a titanosaur. He mentions a six-foot femur and quote-unquote gigantic vertebrae, which would put it in the same scale as the largest sauropods and therefore the largest animals ever to walk the Earth, which is pretty cool. I would love to get an estimate of how large they think it is. Yeah.

I think it might be a Rabakisaurid just based on it being from that time and from Niger and a Titanosaur, but we'll have to see. So that's the first one that was making a lot of people get excited. It is exciting. It is, but it's sort of been around and known about for a couple of years. Whereas the newer one about the validity of Saurophaganax is,

has been making all sorts of memes happen about, you know, like, oh, we thought Saurophaganax might not be real because it was just an Allosaurus. And now it turns out it's actually a sauropod. What is going on? That's a very different direction. Yes. Which I think just threw a lot of people off. And that's why memes happened. It also resulted in one of the most fitting posts on Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week in a while.

because Matt Waddle wrote a post explaining that he believes the vertebrae included in the Sorophaginax holotype are not from an allosauroid, or allosaurid even, but from a sauropod. So they were, in fact, sauropod vertebrae, and he has pictures of them this week on his blog. Sauropod vertebrae picture of the week. So a lot of the memes on this sort of

tell a story of Saurafaganax actually being some ferocious sauropod. But that is unfortunately not the story at all. As cool as it would be if there was a late Jurassic hypercarnivorous sauropodomorph, much like their Triassic ancestors, that somehow survived on a ghost lineage for 50 plus million years and evolved into something bigger than Allosaurus.

But very similar to Allosaurus. That would be super cool. But instead, this is probably a case of multiple species of dinosaurs being accidentally combined together into a single specimen and then named as a holotype together. So an accidental chimera. Yeah. Yeah, those are called chimera. They said, quote, In our estimation, the axial elements used to diagnose Saurophaganax, including the holotype, belong to one or more sauropods.

If you disagree, that's cool. I'm not going to engage in any skirmishes right now when our battleship will be in range shortly. That was obviously in the blog. They're getting ready. Yeah. And basically say like, I'm going to present the whole case and then you can shoot me down.

I do need to point out, though, just like when brontosaurus was considered a synonym of apatosaurus, the bones didn't cease to exist. And as Waddle put it, quote, that still leaves a big pile of material from a really big allosaurid, end quote. So yes, the vertebrae are likely from a sauropod, at least according to Waddle and his co-authors. But

He's not saying that the huge claw that was found with it or any of the other obvious carnivorous theropod type material is from a sauropod. He's saying that's probably still from a big allosaurid. But who cares? We're talking about the sauropod now.

I guess. So interestingly, I went back to the first literature on Saurophagus, which was the original name, but it was preoccupied. So it was later changed to Saurophaganax.

Saurophagus was first informally named in 1941 in a magazine, but it didn't have detailed illustrations or descriptions, so it wasn't considered a valid official naming of a dinosaur. We've talked about that before on how you have to properly explain your new genus, your new scientific name of an animal, in the right method. Otherwise, it's a naked name, a nominutum.

So in 1995, Dan Schur wrote the official paper. At that point, he was the paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument, and we interviewed him back in episode 103, if that name sounds familiar. We interviewed him while we were at an SVP. Oh, yeah, we did.

So Dan renamed Saurophagus to Saurophaganax, which is Greek for king of the reptile eaters. That's a lofty name. It's a really cool name. And the species name is Maximus, which is Latin for greatest. The greatest king. The greatest king of the reptile eaters is an extremely lofty name. And it is funny if that would be ascribed to a sauropod, which probably did not eat any reptiles at all.

But it could still be the king. It doesn't say how it's the king. I guess so. Yeah, it could be the king of the reptile eaters as in like it's bigger and badder than the reptile eaters. Yeah, they all have to respect it. It doesn't have to eat reptiles in order to be king of the reptile eaters. It can eat plants and still dominate over the reptile eaters. See, you get it. But...

When he did this original description, he identified, quote, at least two individuals, end quote, because of the number of foot and thigh bones. But there weren't any maps from the quarry to work from. So the original position of the bones was impossible to know. And he described it as similar to Allosaurus, but, quote, approximately 25% larger than any described specimen of Allosaurus, end quote. Pretty big.

Yeah, and Allosaurus was already basically the biggest carnivore in the ecosystem. So being 25% larger is pretty cool. And also Allosaurus is very popular. So naming a larger version of Allosaurus is also really neat. But he pointed out the size isn't enough to name a new genus. Fortunately, he found three unique features in the bones, which would justify naming a new genus.

But all three of those features are in the vertebrae, and one of them is a, quote, feature unique among theropods, end quote, possibly because it's not a theropod. Because the vertebrae belongs to a sauropod? Potentially, yes.

But I will say two of the other features look similar to vertebrae in Tyrannosaurids. So it isn't just like, oh, we have these vertebrae that look nothing like we've ever seen in a theropod before. And therefore, when combined with these other obvious theropod bones, it must be a new theropod. It's

It's not that much of an obvious mistake where you took these obvious sauropod vertebrae and these obvious theropod teeth and claws and said, wow, that's a funny combination, knowing that you don't have a picture of where they all came from. Instead, some of them look like Tyrannosaurid features, so it's not completely unreasonable to think, oh, this is just a new theropod vertebrae.

But back to Waddle's blog, he said, quote, we, the same author team from the abstract, have a long, lavishly illustrated paper in revision at an open access journal. The paper goes into far more detail and with all the evidence we could bring to bear on the identity of the type and referred material of Sorafaganax, and it will be freely available to the world once it's published, end quote. Nice. And we will read it.

At some point once it's published. Yes. And talk about it as soon as we can. Although with the speed of publication, it might not get published until after we're back from parental leave. And we'll get into our new dinosaurs in just a moment. But first, we're going to pause for a quick sponsor break. It's your last chance to get your limited edition Allosaurus patch.

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Well, this worked out nicely because we can just jump right into our first new dinosaur, which is a new sauropod. Another new sauropod? Keep this sauropod train going. Actually, the saurophygonax maybe sauropod might not be new because it might just be an existing sauropod that's already known from the ecosystem. We're still talking about sauropods. It's true. So yes, there's a new sauropod dinosaur.

Ardentosaurus Vietor. This was published by Tom Vanderlinden and others in Paleontologia Electronica. It's open access, so we're keeping our open access theme going too.

This sauropod lived in the late Jurassic in what's now Wyoming in the U.S. It was found in the Morrison Formation, which the Morrison Formation is known, of course, for having a lot of sauropods. Specifically, it was a Diplodocid, which is one of the most recognizable sauropod families. They're known for their long necks and even longer tails, those whip-like tails. Yep, because Diplodocus and Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus, if you're into that, were all named for the Morrison Formation, too. If you're into that. Yeah.

This Diplodocid was found at the Howe Quarry in the Morrison. That quarry was first excavated in 1934, and Barnum Brown and a team found a bone bed with about 3,000 bones. Unfortunately, a lot of them were lost because of neglect. And that site was abandoned until 1989. Then Hans Jacob Sieber and his team from Switzerland reopened the quarry. And they found a second site nearby in 1992 with a lot of fossils called the Howe Stevens Quarry now.

There's a lot of diplodocids and almost complete chimerosaurid and other dinosaurs that weren't sauropods, but we're not talking about those. Most of the fossils are well-preserved, including skin, and there's only minor evidence of scavenging, so they were probably buried quickly. It could be that they all died before they were buried and then they got transported by a flood. It also seems that there's a large tree trunk that lay across the river which kept them in their spot, and that would have also helped them get buried quickly.

A literal log jam. Yes. Not just one of those metaphorical log jams. Yes. Of fossils in a river. So these sauropod fossils, they were excavated between 1993 and 1994. Originally, it was thought they belonged to Diplodocus. And they had a nickname, Brosemele. I don't speak German. Well, this means crumbly in Swiss German. I'm sure my pronunciation is off.

but it was crumbly because it was a little bit fragile. They found a semi-articulated partial skeleton that includes neck bones, back bones, tail bones, several ribs, parts of the shoulder, parts of the hip, and part of the left back leg. So these fossils, they were shipped to Switzerland, probably because the team that found them was from Switzerland. Then at some point they got sent to Germany. It's unclear when. Unfortunately, they got damaged by

By a museum fire. There was malicious arson in 2003. Oh no. About 15% of the bones prepared were damaged. And some of the bones destroyed included most of the neck bones that were being prepared at the time. Boo. I know. There are some photographs of the lost bones, just not enough to describe them in great detail. And then the bones ended up in the Netherlands, where it is today. The genus name Ardentosaurus means to burn lizard. It refers to the specimen getting burned by the fire.

Because, well, also some of the bones were lost, but some of them still have the burn marks. And then the species name, Vietor, means traveler. It refers to the dinosaur's long journey to the Netherlands. This dinosaur had unique details on the vertebrae, on its sauropod vertebrae. The specimen was a fully mature adult. Based on histology, they found it was about 22 years old. They found it also reached sexual maturity at age 13 and skeletal maturity at age 17.

The femur is incomplete, but is estimated to be over 4 feet or 1.3 meters long. And based on a figure in the paper, thank you Garrett for looking into that, we're estimating, that they're estimating, the sauropod was about 55 feet long or 17 meters, and about 15 feet tall or 4.5 meters tall at the head, and almost 10 feet or 3 meters tall at the hip.

Yeah, so that's all based on their little silhouette from the bones that they found. But they're very rough estimates because like that total length of 55 feet is probably plus or minus about 15 feet because they only have, what, two or three tail vertebrae? And the tail is probably over 50 vertebrae. So depending on how big and how many vertebrae they are, there could be a really big difference in the total length of the animal. Yes.

Another cool thing about this sauropod is there's an interesting first chevron that's at the base of the tail. The chevron's the bony arch on the bottom side of the tailbone, which might be a clue to sexual dimorphism, although we need further studies on this. And it's especially interesting because the first chevron in sauropods aren't usually preserved. And this chevron has a flat blade with distinct ridges that were a large muscle scar that

And muscle scar size hasn't been tested yet for sexual dimorphism. So that's why the authors brought up, well, maybe in the future, future studies could look at this. Yeah. The reason why, if you're wondering why would the chevron on the bottom of a tail, base of the tail, uh,

matter. That's near where the cloaca is, which is where dinosaurs both laid eggs and mated. So if there's something going on there in terms of the soft tissue difference between a male and a female, whether it's for an ovipositor or something with the genitals inside that need to come out because they probably had internal genitals, then you might be able to see it on the bone in that point and not really much else in the skeleton.

Yes. So it'll be interesting to see future studies on this, if there are any. Well, that brings me to our next news item, which is that there's another sauropod with a tail club. Nice. Yes, this was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Tariq Karim and others. The sauropod is Cotosaurus, which lived in the early to middle Jurassic in what's now India, was found in the Cota Formation.

There's only four sauropods of about 250 known species that are known to have tail clubs. So we've got Shunosaurus, Omasaurus, a species of Mementiosaurus, and now Cotosaurus. And I feel like at least one of those is a little bit more of an inference. Like we don't have a great tail club from all of them either. Mm-hmm.

The Shunosaurus, though, is a good one. That is the best one, or at least the one that I think of. The Omeasaurus, I saw a picture of it, and it's pretty good, too. So maybe we're thinking of a Menchosaurus because that one wasn't in the paper as much. What they did was they compared tail clubs, and it seems that they're made up of three elements that fuse together in adulthood. And Cotosaurus had a tail club similar to tail clubs of two sauropods that were found in China, Shunosaurus and Omeasaurus.

Cotosaurus is the first example of a sauropod tail club found outside of China, though, since it was found in India. The fossils of Cotosaurus were found in the 1970s. There's at least 12 individuals from different life stages. And four of those specimens had tail clubs. Oh, wow. And they were found in the 70s and we're just finding out about them now? I guess maybe people weren't looking at the tails as much. Hmm.

These clubs had an ellipsoidal shape, kind of like a squashed sphere. That's how I would describe the Shunosaurus one too. They're also rugose or rough, the texture on the surface. And they're made of those three elements or structures. Yeah, I was thinking they look kind of like a big potato with like big sort of dents in it. That's not what I would think of them, but okay. I could see that.

The tail clubs are also different sizes. Seems like they're linked to the age of the specimen where the older ones had bigger clubs. Just a quick note, the authors mentioned growth lines in the tail clubs, but there was some debate on the dinosaur mailing list about whether those are growth lines or diagenetic alteration where things changed in the sediments from fossilization because the tools that were used on the dinosaur mailing list, they said that the scan was too coarse to capture growth lines. Hmm.

But still, my main takeaway was tail clubs on a sauropod. Yeah, that's very cool. And it's cool that they have different life stages, too, because there's always that question of when did they get the tail club? Was it just on the adults for competing for mates or fighting off predators or whatever? Or is it on the juveniles? And how did that shape and size change over time? That's very cool.

It is a hope more sauropods are later known to have tail clubs. Yeah, and it sounds like we could use some more research on these ones too with some higher quality scans and things. All right, back to the new dinosaurs. Had to mention the sauropod stuff first. There is a new ornithopod dinosaur, Ameliosaurus alessandrii. This was published in Cretaceous Research by R.A. Corey and others.

And there are a lot of accolades that go with this one. Accolades might be too lofty of a word, but it's the first recognized rhabdodontoid ornithopod from South America. Rhabdodontoids are herbivorous dinosaurs. They're known for their spade-shaped teeth as well as uniquely shaped femur humerus and ulna or thigh bone and arm bones. Think Zalmoxis from Prehistoric Planet if you're thinking rhabdodontids.

Or rhabdodon. Yes. But this new one, Ameliosora, is also the oldest, most basal rhabdodontoid and the earliest Cretaceous Ornithischian from Patagonia. Those are its accolades? Yes. Claims to fame? Yes. And it helps show the early evolution of the rhabdodontomorphs in that it's more complex than we previously thought.

So a Muleasaur was kind of bulky, walked on two legs, had a long tail, long arms, a small head. It was medium-sized, estimated to be about 16 feet or 5 meters long. That's a rough estimate based on one of the figures in the paper. It lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now New Ken Province, Argentina, in the Molicinco Formation. The fossils were found in 2009. The genus name

Amelia Sora means Amelia's lizard, and it's in honor of Amelia Grandma Ondetia de Fiques, founder of the first museum in Las Lajas and, quote, pioneer in the recovery of the local history. That's why she's known as Grandma? Could be. I couldn't find an explanation on Grandma. They're just like, she's called Grandma. That's all you need to know. And then the species name Alessandri is in honor of Carlos Alessandri.

who found the fossils. Partial skeletons of two individuals were found, and they include parts of the shoulder, arms, legs, hips, and tail bones. And it had unique features in the hips, legs, and feet. And like I mentioned in the beginning of the show, it had wide, strong feet. Based on histology, the specimens were both sub-adults and still actively growing. The bones, however, were too delicate to count lags, so they don't have an estimate of their exact ages.

And some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include sauropods like Pilmatuea and Carcharodontosaurids like Lachasvenidor. So that brings me to our next news item, which also has to do with ornithopods. I see what you think of ornithopods, that you're sticking the ornithopods way at the end.

Oh, no, I had a theme going because first we talked about the new sauropod and then we talked about sauropod tails. Then we talked about the new ornithopod and now we have a new ornithopod research paper to go with it. Okay, I got you. The enantiornithines are actually the last ones. Oh, that makes sense. Anyway, by the end of the Cretaceous, ornithopod dinosaurs had evolved teeth that made them very successful plant eaters.

We talk about that a fair amount, but this paper dove into what made them so successful. This was published by Attila, Osi, and others in Nature Communications and its Open Access. And the team, they looked at tooth formation time, tooth replacement rates, and daily tooth wear rates of 16 types of ornithopods. Hmm.

Ornithopods, of course, include dinosaurs like Iguanodon, but then you've got the Hadrosaurs. Those are the ones known for being the cows of the Cretaceous and having those dental batteries. Yeah, and wearing down their teeth pretty quickly, presumably. Yes. In this paper, they found the average tooth wore away in less than two months. Also, that teeth and jaws changed a lot as ornithopods evolved. And early ones like Iguanodon took more than 200 days to form their teeth.

Hadrosaurs, by the end of the Cretaceous, though, could wear through their teeth in something like 50 days. They probably ate tough plants, so they needed the new teeth more. That's some fast tooth wear. Yes. Hadrosaurs also had more teeth. They also had ridges behind the teeth and blade-like edges on one side, and they ground the upper and lower teeth together to keep them sharp. We do see some similar changes in ceratopsians like Triceratops, which had more teeth, more replacement teeth, and were more efficient at eating plants as well.

But later, ornithopods could also slide their jaws back and forth and side to side so they could grind plants down better. They also had larger bodies, which meant they had larger guts to digest that plant matter. Before the Cretaceous, ornithopod teeth had large pits, so it could be they were eating a lot of plant seeds as well as dust and soil because they were eating close to the ground. But then later, they had fewer pits and more scratches, so it could be that they were eating tougher plants or eating in a different way.

They learned to stop eating dirt. I guess. And they didn't go for the seeds as much. Now, angiosperms or flowering plants started diversifying around the end. Well, the end for non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. But horsetails, ferns, and conifers were still more common. So it's really hard to prove a link between the changes in flowering plants. The changes in the dinosaur teeth, that is.

But good for those ornithopods. They found their niche and they expanded into it. And good for them being able to get new teeth every 50 days. Jealous? Yes. I'm perpetually jealous of these animals. They wouldn't even need toothpaste.

It's just, you know, you chew for 50 days, the teeth fall out. You never even worry about it. Yeah, but they also spent a lot more of their days eating. Is that a bad thing? Not a bad thing, but if you wanted to do something else. I mean, we got hands so we can multitask better. There's a big bowl of food and just keep chewing while you're working on other stuff.

Feed bag. Oh, man. Well, speaking of dinosaurs and how they ate, this next one is about how birds from the late Cretaceous existed along dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus and they lived like today's birds of prey. Oh, this one made some news. I saw first bird of prey dot dot dot headlines. Oh, yeah. A lot of places. And thank you to our patron Michelle for sharing this one with us.

This was published by Alexander Clark and others in PLOS One. So it's a pretty lengthy paper. The team described three new and anti-ornithine specimens from the Hell Creek Formation in the U.S. As a quick reminder, anti-ornithines were very diverse in the Cretaceous. There's something like half of all known species are from that period. Many of them are known from China, mostly from the early Cretaceous, but they're also known from Spain.

So it's cool that we've got some more in the U.S. And all three of these specimens in the paper, they're large for birds. So they help show that an antiornithine's got larger over time. At least some of them did. When each specimen represents a new species. Oh, man. So the first new species is Avasaurus darwini, named in honor of Charles Darwin.

They found a complete right tarsometatarsus in July of 2022. Sort of a leg foot bone. That's what a tarsometatarsus is. Yeah, it's a foot bone between the ankle and toes.

And Avasaurus, the name means bird lizard, which is pretty funny. I'm kind of surprised that one hasn't been used yet because there are so many lizard-y birds out there or dinosaur-y birds. Well, it was used because the type species Avasaurus archibaldi was named in 1985. Oh, okay. Based on a tarsometatarsus. So the Darwinite part is the new part. Yeah. New species, not new genus species.

Another reason why this is one of the later news items for us. It might not normally be, but since we're packing in all the new dinosaurs that we can, here we are. So, Avasaurus darwini, the specimen's about the size of a large hawk, and it's got a wingspan estimated to be about 1.3 meters or 4.3 feet.

And it's estimated to weigh up to 3.7 pounds or 1.6 kilograms. That's sort of big. Big for an anti-ornithine, I think. Oh, true. Not big for a bird of prey, though. The other specimen is an unnamed species of avosaurus. They found a partial right tarsometatarsus. And they know it was different, but they just weren't ready to give it a name. It's only part of one bone, so I can see why they chose that.

Well, as in Antiornithines, and Antiornithines aren't an ancestor of modern birds, but they did evolve the same traits, it turns out, as modern raptors, at least these ones did. And before, the oldest known birds of prey were from the beginning of the Cenozoic, which is that period after the non-avian dinosaurs died out. We do need more fossils to get a better sense of what these two specimens looked like, like if they had teeth or hooked beaks, for example, because again, we really only know about one foot. Yeah. But we do know a lot from those foot bones. Yeah.

Like, that they could capture, subdue, and carry off prey like a hawk, owl, and eagle. They had a robust muscle attachment point, similar to hawks and owls, which shows it had powerful leg muscles and feet that could grip prey and maybe carry proportionally heavy prey.

And there were also grooves that show potentially powerful toes. So it may have hunted small mammals, lizards, and other birds. It's impressive they figured all that out from just one bone. Although one bone, that's really many bones fused together. Yes. And it also helps that a lot of enantiornithines have been found. So you can make comparisons. Now, also in the paper, they named another enantiornithine, Magnus avis ecolacensis.

Named after Ecolaca? It sure is. The species name refers to Ecolaca Montana, where the fossils were found. And Ecolaca is Lakota for one who wanders. Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that. The genus name Magnus Avis means big bird in Latin. Those big bird and bird lizard. Yeah. There's not too much for me to say about this one. They also found a partial right tarsometatarsis, but I felt like the name was worth mentioning.

And also a quick note on the name. I read on the dinosaur mailing list that the spelling of Magnavis was already used for a brand of visible magnetic ink and was copyrighted. Otherwise, that would have been the correct way to do it. So they made it Magnuavis? They made it Magnusavis. Oh, Magnusavis. Magnus is masculine, avis is feminine, so that's why it technically doesn't match. I see.

So if you wanted to call Big Bird and Sesame Street properly in Latin, you'd have to call it Magnavis. I guess so. But if you did it on PBS, you might get copyright infringement from this ink company. Possibly. Possibly. So yeah, we got the Big Bird and the Bird Lizard.

It's cool that there were birds of prey in North America before the Cretaceous extinction. Yeah. And well, I guess birds, I guess we consider an anti-Ornithine birds, but sort of cousins to modern birds. Yes. Well, I've got one last bonus piece of news before we take a break and get to our dinosaur of the day.

I couldn't tie this one to any other news item, but it just sounded too cool to not mention. There's a rare flat-headed juvenile Pachycephalosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous in what's now Texas in the U.S. This was published by Stephen Wick and Thomas Lehman in Geobios. It might be a new quote-unquote southern species of Stegoceras.

It was found in what was Laramidia, the island continent in the late Cretaceous from when the Western Interior Seaway split North America in two. That's why it's in quotes Southern. So why is it Southern? It's in quotes Southern species. It's just a little more South, but it's not actually in the South. Oh, I see. It's in the Southern part of North America. Yeah. Gotcha. Well, in what was Laramidia. So it was on its own.

But yeah, it was found in what's now Texas. So Stegoceras is a Pachycephalosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous in what's now North America. It was small, walked on two legs. It had a roughly triangular skull with a thick, broad, relatively smooth dome on top of the head, as well as a thick shelf over the back of the skull and a thick ridge over the eyes. In this case, only the frontal bone was found. That's the bone in front of the skull.

And that bone is thinner than any quote-unquote juvenile example of Stegoceras validum. And there's differences in grooves and other details. So it seems, the author said, to not be individual variation. It could be a new species. As of now, though, we're just going to call it Stegoceras species. Yeah, because that is very fraught. But they said it could be a pedomorphic Pachycephalosaur.

Where the dome just doesn't inflate until it's much older. Mm-hmm. Pachycephalosaurs, of course, they were small, medium in size. They're known for those thick dome-like skulls. Though there are flat-headed adult species that have been found in Asia. But then you've got some flatheads. Flatheads reminds me of Land Before Time. Anyway, you've got some flatheads like Dracorex, which are now considered to be a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus. By some people. Yes. Maybe most. I think most at this point.

Although I still really like the name Dracorex. I do too. So some Pachycephalosaurus had domed heads most of their lives and they were only flat-headed as embryos or hatchlings. So it doesn't seem likely that the doming is a sign of sexual maturity. Doming could be sexual dimorphism since there are individuals that are similar in size that have flat heads and others have domed heads.

Or it could be that there were just a bunch of Pachys in areas with multiple species that are similar in size, so delaying that inflating of the dome might help with species recognition. Or maybe they lived in environments with limited resources, like the Aguja Formation where this Pachycephalosaur was found. Maybe they lived in some harsh conditions and...

That affected the inflating of the dome. Yeah, it could be. I mean, there's all sorts of animals that if they're living in an area with less resources, they look different or they can't thrive as much. And a lot of those display structures are an example of like, look how great I'm doing. I can invest all these resources into this display structure, which doesn't have a lot of real world function other than just showing off.

So if it's just not doing great, it might not have a big display structure. Or like you said, it could be a juvenile or it could be a new species. It's just hard to say when you only have one individual. I just think it's funny to think of flat-headed Pachycephalosaurs. So yeah, that is all of our new news for now. We'll know in a few months the total count for a number of new dinosaurs for 2024, but...

For now, I can say we've covered them all. Yeah, up to this point. Yes. As of this recording. Yes. Maybe not when it's released, depending on what happens, especially at SVP. Good point. We did our best. We'll get into our dinosaur of the day, Dilophosaurus, in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors.

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And now on to our Dinosaur of the Day Dilophosaurus, which we're revisiting. This was a request from Steve21 via our Patreon and Discord, so thanks. Dilophosaurus was our Dinosaur of the Day way back in episode 18. And it's definitely time to revisit because there was an updated description that came out in 2020 by Adam Marsh and Timothy Rowe.

The Dilophosaurus was a theropod that lived in the early Jurassic in what's now Arizona in the U.S., the Kayenta Formation. As a theropod, it walked on two legs, it had a long tail, long arms, sharp teeth, and the thing that sets it apart is the two crests on its head. That's the Dilophosaurus. Yes. It was also...

Much larger than how it was depicted in Jurassic Park. And like you said earlier, Garrett, it didn't have that frill. It is, I think, the only example I know of of a dinosaur that was bigger in real life than it was in Jurassic Park. Usually the Jurassic Park dinosaurs are like 50% bigger than they were in real life, but not Dilophosaurus. The real one is like two to three times as big. Yes. Although it could have been a baby, I suppose. Could be a baby, yeah.

Got big display structures for a baby, if that's the case in Jurassic Park. But even without the frill, in real life, Dilophosaurus did look fierce. It was slender and lightly built, estimated to be about 23 feet or 7 meters long and weigh about 880 pounds or 400 kilograms. So way too big to be in that front seat of Nedry's car. Yeah, too big to fit in anything except for like a school bus, basically. Yeah.

There was a histology study in 1996 that found that Dilophosaurus grew 66 to 77 pounds or 30 to 35 kilograms per year early on. It had a woven structure in its bones that showed that it grew quickly.

So again, it walked on two legs and it was active. It had powerful arms and four fingers on each hand with a large claw on its first fingers. There were smaller claws on the middle fingers and a vestigial fourth finger. It had large thigh bones, stout feet, and large claws on the toes. It kept its first toe, the hallux, off the ground. Third toe was the stoutest one. It had hollow, light vertebrae, a long, flexible neck, a large, delicate skull, and a narrow snout.

And of course it had the pair of arched crests on its skull that were probably covered in keratin in life, so they would have been even bigger.

Yeah, and the description of it as being sort of lightly built, but having like four fingers, a lot of it sounds very strange. That's because it's from the early Jurassic. And most of the predatory dinosaurs we talk about are from the Cretaceous, maybe the late Jurassic. But early Jurassic isn't where we talk about a lot of dinosaurs from. This is much earlier than a lot of other dinosaurs. And even though it was only 23 feet long, it was pretty huge for its time, especially for a predator. Oh, yeah.

The paleoartist Brian Eng reconstructed Dilophosaurus based on Martian rose paper and mentioned that, yes, it had weird proportions. He also mentioned we don't know the true crest shape because we don't know what the top of it looked like. Yeah, we're sort of missing the tops. We do know Dilophosaurus had an upper jaw with a gap or kink below the nostril. You can see this in other dinosaurs, though, including Coelophysoids. And Spinosaurus. It also had powerful jaws.

A slender, delicate front of the upper jaw, though, and then it was deep in the back. It had long, curved, thin teeth. Most of the teeth were serrated. In 2018, Senter and Sullivan studied the range of motion for Dilophosaurus arms and found that it could grip and hold objects as well as bring objects to its mouth and swing its arms and scratch its chest or belly. That's important. Yeah. What if it gets itchy?

A Dilophosaurus may have gone after large animals, as well as eaten smaller animals and fish. There's been a lot of debate about how and what it ate. Sam Wells, who named Dilophosaurus, found it did not have a powerful bite and was probably a scavenger. He also saw Dilophosaurus as active and using its arms as weapons with hands that could grasp and slash.

Bob Bogger later found with its large neck and skull and large teeth that it could go after large prey. Gregory Paul also suggested that Dilophosaurus hunted large animals and could also go after smaller animals. A study in 2005 found the front of the jaws had a strong bite, so it could use those to subdue prey. And then the stress on the jaws was consistent with struggling small prey. So maybe it slashed prey to wound it and then captured the prey in the front of its jaws.

And then the prey may have moved to the back of the jaws where the largest teeth were and they were killed by the slicing bites. In 2007, Milner and Kirkland suggested Dilophosaurus ate fish based on the ends of the jaws that formed this rosette of interlocking teeth, similar to Spinosaurids, which we think eat fish. Both Dilophosaurus and Spinosaurus had long arms and well-developed claws, which could help them catch fish, and nasal openings that were retracted, which might have helped keep water out while fishing.

In 1990, Stephen and Sylvia Serkis suggested Dilophosaurus had an aquatic lifestyle with a weak pelvis that needed the water to help support its weight. Though they didn't think it only lived in water. Interesting. I think they're in the minority. Yeah. The old sauropods need to live in water comes to mind. Yeah.

Marsh and Rowe in 2020 suggested that Dilophosaurus could prey on large animals, though it may have also eaten fish and small prey. They suggested the premaxilla and maxilla of the upper jaw was not mobile and more robust than previously thought, and Dilophosaurus could have grasped animals with its arms while hunting and scavenging.

There's some large tooth marks found on the sauropodomorph Sarasaurus that's thought to be from Dilophosaurus because the tooth marks match the right size for that dinosaur. Yeah, because again, there were not a lot of other large predatory dinosaurs in the early Jurassic. Yes. Not a lot of options for big tooth marks. Yeah.

Brown and Rowe in 2021 said Dilophosaurus could puncture bone with its jaws. They also found it had unidirectional breathing like birds where air flows in and out of the lungs, and that means it had a high metabolism. It was probably fast and agile. So they thought Dilophosaurus was an apex predator, not a scavenger. The crests of Dilophosaurus, they start as low ridges at the front of the skull, and then they get higher and plate-shaped toward the roof of the skull.

Yeah, a lot bigger, again, than the Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park. The Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park, I feel like are two semicircles sort of farther back on the head. At least the Brian Ng interpretation of the skull, and I guess would be the modern interpretation because I'm sure he worked with the authors on how to draw it, starts very far on the tip of the snout, goes up really high and extends all the way back towards the back of the head, basically. Yes. And it

It's almost more like a mohawk or like two mohawks next to each other all the way across the head. Because it starts at the front of the snout. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, on our head, right? Yeah. The mohawk starts sort of in front of the head too. Well, it's unclear what the crests were used for. They would have been too weak to fight with, but maybe they were used for display, like to recognize each other or attract mates. Yeah.

There were air sacs in the bones around the brain, and they're linked with sinus cavities in the front of the skull. And the opening in front of the eye sockets were also linked to the side of the crest, so the crest probably also had air sacs. Yeah, so they might have been hollow. And maybe helped regulate body temperature. The type species is Dilophosaurus weatherili. Three skeletons were found in 1940 in Arizona. Only two were collected in 1942.

It took 10 days to collect those two skeletons. Wells said it was a rush job. And then they brought them back to Berkeley, the UC Museum of Paleontology. It was Jesse Williams, a Navajo man who first found the fossils in 1940. And according to Navajo myth, footprints and dinosaur bones were often explained as belonging to monsters killed off by the hero twins who slayed monsters.

And when the hero twins slayed a monster, they buried the monster and turned it into stone. Over time, they got rid of all the monsters on Earth and then people were able to take over. Such a cool legend. It is. Yeah, and they were getting rid of monsters as part of their quest to meet their father. Interesting. There's a lot more to it than that. It's a really cool myth, but I'll get back to Dilophosaurus. So Dilophosaurus, as I said, there were three skeletons originally found and they were ranged in triangle.

The first one was nearly complete. The second one was eroded, but had the front of the skull, lower jaws, vertebrae, limb bones, and an articulated hand. The third one, however, was so eroded it was almost gone and there were only fragments of the vertebrae, so that's why they only dug up two of them. Just to be pedantic, any three points make a triangle, but I see what you mean. Probably roughly equilateral triangle to say they were arranged in a triangle.

Oh, I see. Because you define a triangle by three points. It doesn't matter where on earth they are. Every three things are in a triangle. Not if they were parallel to each other. It'd still be in a triangle. Oh, you mean like if they're exactly in a line? That's true. Yeah. You could technically have three if they're perfectly in a line. Okay. You're not interested in the pedigree. Yeah.

Not that particular one. So the holotype was nearly complete. It was only missing the front of the skull, parts of the pelvis, and some vertebrae. The skull was crushed. It took three people two years to clean and mount the holotype. So 10 days to dig it up, two years to prepare it. Got to take your time when you're prepping. Yep. Wells didn't think it was a new dinosaur at first, or at least a new genus.

Originally, it was thought to be a new species of Megalosaurus, Megalosaurus weatheralli, when Samuel Wells named it in 1954. It was considered to be Megalosaurus at first because they had similar limb proportions, and also, Megalosaurus was that wastebasket taxon for a while. Wells also didn't realize that it had crests, because the crests were thin and crushed together, and they were thought to be a misplaced cheekbone. Hmm.

In 1964, Wells found another skeleton near where the first ones were found that was nearly complete and larger than the holotype. And then he realized there were crests on the skull, so he named Dilophosaurus weatherali in 1970. And he said the crests were as unexpected as finding, quote, wings on a worm. Interesting. So the genus name Dilophosaurus means two-crested lizard.

The species name Wetherillii is in honor of John Wetherill, a Navajo counselor that Wells said was, quote, an explorer, friend of scientists, and trusted trader. Now, interestingly, Wells didn't actually think that that 1964 specimen was Dilophosaurus, even though they both had crests, the 64 specimen and the first two. But he passed away before he could name the dinosaur.

Other paleontologists either found no significant differences between the 1964 specimen and the holotype, or they found the differences were due to individual variation or how they were preserved or their different ages. Now that 1964 specimen is considered to be an adult because of its size, and the first two skeletons found were considered to be juveniles, it's possible that they are juveniles or sexual dimorphism, which seems to be coming up a lot this episode.

where some are more gracile and some are more robust, although there's no evidence that's been found of sexual dimorphism, though it's possible maybe there were some differences in the crests because we don't know the top of the crests. In 2001, Robert Gay identified at least three more Dilophosaurus specimens based on hip bone fragments and different size femora or thigh bones. They weren't identified until 2001, but they were found in 1978, also near the original specimens, and they'd been labeled as, quote, a large theropod.

That is vague. It is. But they helped fill in some gaps about the skeleton. And some of the bones belong to an infant, which is pretty cool. A 2005 study of the bones found that most Dilophosaurus specimens were juveniles and only the largest one was an adult because the bones were co-ossified. And as I mentioned, Adam Marsh and Timothy Rowe re-described Dilophosaurus in 2020. Marsh spent seven years studying the specimens.

They studied five specimens, and they found Dilophosaurus to be a neotheropod. Several more specimens have been referred to Dilophosaurus, but there's not enough features to confirm them, so they're referred to as CF Dilophosaurus weatherali. But it's cool because we know the jawbones, parts of the skull, including the brain case, the spine, neck, back, and tailbones, parts of the shoulders, arms, hands, hips, legs, and feet. Pretty much the whole animal. Yeah.

And most of the crests. There was a second species for a while, Dilophosaurus sinensis. Named in 1993, it was found in China. But now that's considered to be a sinosaurus. The holotype of Dilophosaurus had a lot of pathologies, but it's hard to tell how it got them. One possibility is it's from one encounter, like it collided with a tree or rock while fighting.

I remember that paper talking about all those injuries. Yeah, there are a lot. It's got a groove on a tailbone that might have been from an injury or being crushed. Two pits on the right arm that might have been from collections of pus. Or they could be artifacts of how it was preserved. There's a smaller, more delicate left humerus or upper arm bone than the right. And a smaller, more delicate lower right arm bone than the left. And that could be a developmental anomaly known as fluctuating asymmetry.

which could be caused by stress or pressures in the environment or from traumatic events. Now, all of the injuries, at least, had healed, so the Dilophosaurus seems to have survived for a while after it got hurt, like months or even years. While healing, though, it probably couldn't use its arms well to capture prey, so it might have done a lot of fasting or maybe it only went after small prey. There are footprints found near where the first Dilophosaurus specimens were found, and they had three toes, so they may have been Dilophosaurus tracts.

There were also tracks found in Connecticut in 1966 by a bulldozer operator. They were assigned to Eubrontes, which became the state fossil of Connecticut in 1991. Yeah, usually if you read about Eubrontes, they'll say it's probably from Dilophosaurus or a Dilophosaurus-like dinosaur. Yes.

That area at the time was being excavated for a state building, and then in 1968 instead it became Dinosaur State Park. Because they found so many tracks there they didn't want to put a building on top of it. Exactly. Wells also named the Ichnogenus Dilophosaurus Williamseye, based on Williams, who found the skeletons. There's other tracks found around the world that at times were considered to be made by a dinosaur like Dilophosaurus.

But in some cases, they could be other theropods or even from sauropodomorphs. There's one resting track considered to be made by a theropod that's similar to Dilophosaurus and Lillian sternus. And for a while, it was considered to have feather impressions. But a 2004 study found that the impressions were pressure release structures caused by when the dinosaur was moved after it rested. So they found that the theropod sat back on its feet, shifted its weight to the right when it stood up and moved forward.

But that doesn't mean it didn't have feathers, just that we don't see feather marks because the feather marks would look different. The resting tracks are cool because they show the dinosaur was crouching and using its hands to crouch, and it left some thin drag marks from the end of its tail. Don't get a lot of tail drag marks. No, we don't. Which is partly how we know dinosaurs didn't usually drag their tails. So the track site attributed to Dilophosaurus in Arizona is known as the Big Lizard Tracks in Navajo.

That's fun. It is. Dilophosaurus is the state dinosaur of Connecticut as of 2017, based on the tracks that were found there that are considered to belong to dinosaurs similar to Dilophosaurus. The uberantes. Exactly. Of course, you can see Dilophosaurus in the movie Jurassic Park. Sort of. Well, a version of it. Something named Dilophosaurus that doesn't have much in common with actual Dilophosaurus. It's got the crests. Yeah, it's true. It's also mentioned in the novel.

Like we said before, in real life, it wouldn't have spit venom, probably didn't have that neck frill, and it was way bigger. But Sam Wells said it was a thrill to see Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park and was, quote, very happy to find Dilophosaurus an internationally known actor.

The Lophosaurus lived in a dry area with a waterway lined with conifers. Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include the armored herbivore Scutellosaurus and the sauropodomorph Sarasaurus, as well as Magapnosaurus and Chiantavenator. And some other animals that lived around the same time and place include sharks, fish, salamanders, frogs, turtles, lizards, crocodillomorphs, mammals, and pterosaurs.

Last but not least on this, what turned out to be a lengthy episode, is our fun fact, which is that ants farmed fungus in the late Cretaceous. This was published by Ted Schultz and others in Science. Why am I bringing this up? Well, it kind of goes with our news item about ornithopods having the best teeth to eat plants and the hypothesis that maybe flowering plants diversifying in the Cretaceous affected them because...

In an upcoming episode, while we're out on parental leave, we have a whole episode dedicated to plants and fungi and how they're related to dinosaurs. So stay tuned. I will. You will. We already recorded it. Anyway, ants, like humans, are farmers, and they've cultivated many lineages of fungus for them to eat. The team found that fungus ant agriculture started about 66 million years ago, and

When the asteroid that killed the non-avian dinosaurs temporarily stopped photosynthesis, and that made it easier for the fungi to thrive. Oh, interesting. So they were farming other things. All of a sudden, there weren't those other things to farm, but there was a bunch of fungus, and they were just like, well, I guess we'll farm this instead. I'm not sure if they were farming, but they were definitely eating other things. Hmm.

And for context, humans started domesticating plants about 12,000 years ago. So ants had a big head start. About 66 million years, because 12,000 years is basically a rounding error at that point. Yes. For this study, they analyzed 475 fungal species cultivated by ants. They found two fungal lineages from the same ancestor of today's leafcutter ants from 66 million years ago.

It's possible that the leafcutter ant ancestors lived near the fungi and then ate it sometimes, and the fungi was already adapted to be cultivated because of this. So like I was saying, it wasn't a big part of their diet at first, but then after the asteroid hit, it became much more important. It was probably their only food source. The team also found that about 27 million years ago, there was one type of fungus that was domesticated and it was mutually beneficial for the fungus and the ants.

They were in a seasonally dry habitat in South America, and it was mutually beneficial because the fungus decomposes organic matter carried by the ants, and then the ants eat what the fungus produces that it can't get from other sources. Today, there are four groups of ants that cultivate four types of fungi. And in some cases, the ants even change the fungus to provide certain nutrients. They form structures...

the fungi, similar to grape clusters and that are rich in sugars. But it's unclear how the ants do this. They got some secrets, those ants. They do. They're very impressive animals. They are. I remember learning that ants can live up to 20 years. So most people that find ants in their house, there's a good chance that those ants have lived in their house longer than they have. It's really the ant's house. Yeah.

Very cool. They are. That is cool. So that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned. Our next episode will be celebrating 100 years of Velociraptor. And that's our first episode that we'll be releasing while we're out on parental leave. So thank you for sticking with us and for your support. We hope you enjoy our parental leave episodes.

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