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Mysterious 3-Toed Footprints in Canada Reveal New Ankylosaur Species

Mysterious 3-Toed Footprints in Canada Reveal New Ankylosaur Species

Yahoo17-04-2025

Sets of prehistoric three-toed footprints pressed into stone have led paleontologists to discover a new dinosaur in the armored ankylosaurid family.
The trackways were found near the town of Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia, which became known for its ankylosaur fossils after Mark Turner and Daniel Helm, both young boys at the time, first discovered a trackway in 2000.
Ankylosaurids are one of the two main families of ankylosaurs, the other being nodosaurids. We know the difference between these families because of their tail armor: nodosaurids lack the bony tail club that defines the ankylosaurids.
This is the first time we've seen precious, 100-million-year-old ankylosaurid footprints, which have only three toes on their back feet, unlike their relatives' four.
Ankylosaur specialist Victoria Arbour – who also happens to be the paleontology curator at the Royal British Columbia Museum – visited Tumbler Ridge in 2023, where she met with Charles Helm, scientific advisor at the Tumbler Ridge Museum (and Daniel's father).
He showed her a number of three-toed footprint trackways that had been turning up around the area in recent years. All specimens were found within the Tumbler Ridge UNESCO Global Geopark, except for one that was found in western Alberta.
These footprints were preserved in the non-marine deposits of the Dunvegan and Kaskapau Formations, from the middle of the Cretaceous period. At this time, the now-mountainous region of the British Columbia Rockies was a lowland delta, freshly scoured with channels, point bars, shallow lakes, and mud squelchy enough to preserve the imprint of dino toes.
Trackways like this are particularly useful to paleontologists because they provide multiple footprint specimens from the same animal. And in a region lacking skeletal fossil material, well-preserved trace fossils like these are essential to understanding prehistoric life.
Closer analysis of the trackways, digitally rendered using photogrammetry, helped them realize they were looking at traces of a new species, which the team named Ruopodosaurus clava.
The pes (back foot) tracks have "robust digits ending in blunt triangular or U-shaped toe tips," write Arbour, Helm, and their collaborators in a paper describing the species.
The dinosaur's manus (front foot) tracks, however, bear five digits, "distinctly crescentic in form."
"While we don't know exactly what the dinosaur that made Ruopodosaurus footprints looked like, we know that it would have been about 5 to 6 meters (16 to 20 feet) long, spiky, and armored, and with a stiff tail or a full tail club," Arbour says.
"This study also highlights how important the Peace Region of northeastern British Columbia is for understanding the evolution of dinosaurs in North America – there's still lots more to be discovered."
Because no ankylosaurid bones have been found in North America from 100 to 84 million years ago, paleontologists had assumed they had disappeared from the region during the mid-Cretaceous. But the Ruopodosaurus clava trackways show the ankylosaurid family was indeed trampling around the continent at the same time as its nodosaurid cousins.
"It is really exciting to now know through this research that there are two types of ankylosaurs that called this region home, and that Ruopodosaurus has only been identified in this part of Canada," Helm says.
The findings were published in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
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‘The missing link': New early tyrannosaur species discovered by Calgary researchers
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Hamilton Spectator

time5 hours ago

  • Hamilton Spectator

‘The missing link': New early tyrannosaur species discovered by Calgary researchers

CALGARY - Scientists from the University of Calgary have discovered a new dinosaur specimen that they say appears to be the 'missing link' in the evolution of tyrannosaurs. The specimen was originally discovered in Mongolia's Gobi Desert over 50 years ago in the 1970s. But its significance wasn't recognized until Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor in the university's faculty of science, sent graduate student Jared Voris to Mongolia on a research trip. 'He was there a couple of years ago on this research trip and looked at the fossil and texted me (that) he thought it was a new species. I was like, 'yay,'' Zelenitsky told The Canadian Press. 'I said, 'This is good, but we don't want to jump the gun on this.' It turned out it (was) a new species.' The species, Khankhuuluu mongoliensis — meaning 'Dragon Prince' or 'Prince of Dragons of Mongolia' — is believed to have crossed via a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska roughly 85 million years ago. Zelenitsky said it appears to sit on the evolutionary scale between smaller tyrannosauroids and tyrannosaurs. 'It's the missing link between smaller tyrannosauroids and the large predatory tyrannosaurs,' she said. 'This missing link was around 750 kilograms. Its ancestors were a couple of hundred kilograms and just tiny, but then when you get to tyrannosaurs proper, they were over a thousand kilograms, up to estimates of 5,000 kilograms.' The findings were published Wednesday in the British weekly scientific journal 'Nature.' 'It's really exciting to be involved in a discovery of something that's been sitting in a drawer for 50 years. But it's even more exciting when it's a PhD student that makes that discovery,' Zelenitsky added. 'This discovery forced us to look at the family tree of tyrannosaurs in a very different light. It ended up with us rewriting the family history of tyrannosaurs.' The arrival of Khankhuuluu or a similar species after moving from Asia to North America may have been the result of following their prey to a new location, said Zelenitsky. 'It's possible that there weren't many tyrannosaur type predators so it's possible they were able to take over that niche in North America and moved to the top of the food chain,' she said. 'Tyrannosaurs were in the right place at the right time. It allowed them to diversity and evolve a large body size, ultimately becoming the massive apex predator that terrorized North America and Asia during the late Cretaceous period.' Zelenitsky said the evolution to the tyrannosaur happened rapidly, geologically speaking, and probably took a few million years. She has co-authored over 50 different publications during her career and was part of a team that first found evidence of feathered dinosaurs in North America. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 11, 2025. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .

Ancient T. rex ancestor discovered: Khankhuuluu, ‘prince of dragons'
Ancient T. rex ancestor discovered: Khankhuuluu, ‘prince of dragons'

Washington Post

time7 hours ago

  • Washington Post

Ancient T. rex ancestor discovered: Khankhuuluu, ‘prince of dragons'

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Khankhuuluu, known from two partial skeletons in fossil collections at the Institute of Paleontology in Mongolia, helps fill in this gap — a transitional 86 million-year-old species that represents the closest known ancestor to the famed late tyrannosaurs. Previously, it had been described as an alectrosaurus, another early tyrannosaur. Asked for a modern-day comparison, University of Calgary graduate student Jared Voris, who led the work, said to imagine a large, predatory horse. 'What makes them so important is their age,' said Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study. 'They are about 86 million years old, a good 20 million years older than T. rex. It has been a frustrating gap in the record.' Voris was on a research trip in Mongolia in 2023 when he sent a text halfway across the world to his adviser, Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor of paleontology. 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Paleontologists dig through fossilized dino guts to see what's inside
Paleontologists dig through fossilized dino guts to see what's inside

Yahoo

time2 days ago

  • Yahoo

Paleontologists dig through fossilized dino guts to see what's inside

Nothing quite fits the moniker 'gentle giant' more than sauropods. These gargantuan dinosaurs could reach up to 123 feet long and weigh up to seven tons. Sauropods have long been believed to be herbivores, munching on leaves during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Now, for the first time, a team of paleontologists have studied the abdomen of a sauropod with its gut contents still intact that lived roughly 94 to 101 million years ago. The finding confirms that they were in fact herbivores–and did not really chew their food. Instead, sauropods relied on gut microbes to break down its food. The findings are detailed in a study published June 9 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology. 'No genuine sauropod gut contents had ever been found anywhere before, despite sauropods being known from fossils found on every continent and despite the group being known to span at least 130 million years of time,' Stephen Poropat, a study co-author and paleontologist at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement. 'This finding confirms several hypotheses about the sauropod diet that had been made based on studies of their anatomy and comparisons with modern-day animals.' Fossilized dinosaur bones can only tell us so much about these extinct animals. Paleontologists can use trackways and footprints to learn about their movement and preserved gut contents called cololites to put together what their diets may have looked like. Understanding the diet is critical for understanding their biology and the role they played in ancient ecosystems, but very few dinosaur fossils have been found with cololites. These are gut contents that have yet to become poop–or coprolites. In particular, sauropod cololites have remained elusive. With their gargantuan sizes, these dinosaurs may have been the most ecologically impactful terrestrial herbivores on the planet during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. With this lack of direct dietary evidence, the specifics of sauropod herbivory—including the plants that they ate—have mostly been theorized based largely on tooth wear, jaw shape and size, and neck length. But that changed in the summer of 2017. Staff and volunteers at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History were excavating a relatively complete subadult sauropod skeleton. This particular Diamantinasaurus matildae specimen lived during the mid-Cretaceous period and was uncovered in the Winton Formation of Queensland, Australia. The team noticed an unusual, fractured rock layer that appeared to contain the sauropod's cololite with well-preserved plant fossils. The team analyzed the plant specimens within the cololite and found that sauropods likely only engaged in minimal oral processing of their food. Instead of chewing, their gut microbiota would ferment the plants to digest it. The cololite had a wide variety of plants, including foliage from conifers (cone-bearing seed plants), seed-fern fruiting bodies (plant structures that hold seeds), and leaves from angiosperms (flowering plants). From this, it looks like Diamantinasaurus was an indiscriminate, bulk feeder. 'The plants within show evidence of having been severed, possibly bitten, but have not been chewed, supporting the hypothesis of bulk feeding in sauropods,' said Poropat. The team also found chemical biomarkers of both angiosperms and gymnosperms—a group of woody, seed-producing plants that include conifers. [ Related: The mystery of why some dinosaurs got so enormous. ] 'This implies that at least some sauropods were not selective feeders, instead eating whatever plants they could reach and safely process,' Poropat said. 'These findings largely corroborate past ideas regarding the enormous influence that sauropods must have had on ecosystems worldwide during the Mesozoic Era.' Although it was not unexpected that the gut contents provided support for sauropod herbivory and bulk feeding, Poropat was surprised to find angiosperms in the dinosaur's gut. 'Angiosperms became approximately as diverse as conifers in Australia around 100 to 95 million years ago, when this sauropod was alive,' he says. 'This suggests that sauropods had successfully adapted to eat flowering plants within 40 million years of the first evidence of the presence of these plants in the fossil record.' Based on these findings, the team suggests that Diamantinasaurus likely fed on both low- and high-growing plants, at least before adulthood. As hatchlings, sauropods would have only been able to access food that was close to the ground. As they grew (and grew and grew), their viable food options also expanded. Additionally, the prevalence of small shoots, bracts, and seed pods in the cololite implies that subadult Diamantinasaurus likely targeted new growth portions of conifers and seed ferns. These portions of the plant are easier to digest. According to the authors, the strategy of indiscriminate bulk feeding likely served sauropods well for 130 million years. However, as with most studies, there are some important caveats and limitations. 'The primary limitation of this study is that the sauropod gut contents we describe constitute a single data point,' Poropat explained. 'These gut contents only tell us about the last meal or several meals of a single subadult sauropod individual.' We also don't know how the seasons affected diet, or if the plants preserved in this specific sauropod represent a diet typical of a healthy sauropod or a more stressed one. The specimen is also a subabult, which could mean that younger sauropods had this more than adults did. Despite the limitations, it offers an exciting look inside the stomachs of some of the largest creatures to ever live.

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