tag:theconversation.com,2011:/institutions/jurassica-museum-5592/articlesJurassica Museum2022-09-09T07:35:28Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1901512022-09-09T07:35:28Z2022-09-09T07:35:28ZAfrica’s dinosaur discoveries: five essential reads<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483193/original/file-20220907-14-ap277n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Smile if you love dinosaurs as much as Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus loved being a carnivore.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">YuRi Photolife</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Few prehistoric creatures generate as much excitement and awe as dinosaurs. Whether it’s the “tyrant” T-Rex or a slim-necked Brachiosaurus, people are fascinated by these creatures that dominated landscapes all over the world - including across the African continent - hundreds of millions of years ago.</p>
<p>The dinosaurs are long gone (though we’re still surrounded by their direct descendants, birds). But researchers are still hard at work piecing together the fossil record to create a fuller picture of how dinosaurs lived, walked, ate and raised their young. Their discoveries offer a glimpse into ancient landscapes, helping modern scientists to better understand today’s climates and ecosystems.</p>
<p>The Conversation Africa has showcased a number of dinosaur finds on the continent. Here are five essential reads:</p>
<h2>A rich record</h2>
<p>Africa is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of humankind. But less attention is paid to its incredibly varied fossil record. Many of the planet’s most important life forms originated on the continent: bacteria-like organisms; many dinosaur species and, of course, primates – including humans. Even the rocks on the continent are among the oldest in the world. Some of them date back more than three billion years.</p>
<p>That’s what prompted Julien Benoit to create a syllabus for his palaeontology students that centred African fossil discoveries rather than focusing on finds from elsewhere in the world. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/africas-rich-fossil-finds-should-get-the-air-time-they-deserve-91849">Africa's rich fossil finds should get the air time they deserve</a>
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<h2>Hidden in plain sight</h2>
<p>Many museums and universities keep extensive fossil collections. Their contents have been studied, labelled and catalogued. Sometimes, however, they hold secrets that can only be uncovered through a combination of scientific hunch and cutting-edge technology. That’s how Kimberley E.J. Chapelle discovered and described an entirely new species: <em>Ngwevu intloko</em> (“grey skull” in isiXhosa).</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-fossil-hidden-in-plain-sight-in-south-africa-turns-out-to-be-a-new-dinosaur-121597">A fossil hidden in plain sight in South Africa turns out to be a new dinosaur</a>
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<h2>A giant African dinosaur</h2>
<p>Researchers are constantly rewriting the fossil record thanks to new discoveries. Dinosaurs’ fossilised footprints are a useful tool for this work, as evidenced by a – literally – gigantic find in Lesotho. </p>
<p>It was previously thought that ancient southern African landscapes were dominated by small and agile two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods. But Lara Sciscio and her colleagues’ study in Lesotho unexpectedly revealed that very large carnivorous dinosaurs with an estimated body length of between 8 and 9 metres (or 26 feet) – that’s a two-storey building or two adult rhinos nose to tail – lived in the region too.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-the-giant-dinosaur-that-roamed-southern-africa-200-million-years-ago-86004">Meet the giant dinosaur that roamed southern Africa 200 million years ago</a>
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<h2>Footprint finds</h2>
<p>Still on the subject of footprints, it turns out that fossilised dinosaur prints hold incredible detail about more than just the size and shape of the creature that made them. As Miengah Abrahams explains, they can reveal what organism made the tracks – different animals have different footprint shapes. They offer clues to the creature’s behaviour and may even contain evidence of what sort of environment dinosaurs roamed – did they sink into wet sand, or were they standing firmly on dry gravel?</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/footprints-take-science-a-step-closer-to-understanding-southern-africas-dinosaurs-185480">Footprints take science a step closer to understanding southern Africa's dinosaurs</a>
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<h2>A toothy morsel</h2>
<p>Moving from feet to teeth: dinosaurs’ chompers hold important clues to their lives, diets and how they moved across landscapes. That’s why Femke Holwerda ventured to the Kem Kem beds, a geological formation in North Africa, to seek out fossil dinosaur teeth. Her discoveries allowed her to create a fuller picture of the long-necked, plant-eating (herbivorous) dinosaurs, called sauropods, from the Early Cretaceous period of North Africa.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-we-learned-from-dinosaur-teeth-in-north-africa-130894">What we learned from dinosaur teeth in North Africa</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190151/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The African continent is a rich repository for dinosaur fossils, including teeth and track marks.Natasha Joseph, Commissioning EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1829062022-05-26T13:22:12Z2022-05-26T13:22:12ZMy job is full of fossilised poop, but there’s nothing icky about ichnology<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464983/original/file-20220524-18-yvmvxg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The author and a colleague on the hunt for fossil traces.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Morena Nava</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you had told 18-year-old me that I would, one day, be an ichnologist I wouldn’t have believed you – or even known what that was. But, more than 15 years later, I get to introduce <a href="https://www.jurassica.ch/fr/Recherche-Formation/Equipe-scientifique/Postdoctorants/Dr-Lara-Sciscio/Dr-Lara-Sciscio.html">myself as an ichnologist</a>.</p>
<p>Like my teenage self, many people outside the discipline don’t know, or have a limited understanding of, what ichnology is. It’s the study of the tracks and traces made by animals and plants in the fossil record, also called trace fossils. These can range from animal footprints (tracks/trackways), invertebrate trails, feeding traces on fossil leaves, fossilised faeces (coprolites), tooth traces (gnaw/bite marks) on bone/wood, to burrows and borings all preserved in the sedimentary rock record. When someone mentions seeing a “dinosaur footprint” they are talking about ichnology.</p>
<p>It may seem strange to spend so much time looking at fossils from the distant past. But doing so doesn’t just help scientists to understand animals and plants that existed long ago: it also informs our understanding of the environments they occupied and other aspects of the past world like extinction events or climate change. That can help us understand how things might shift in future.</p>
<h2>A rich information source</h2>
<p>Maybe this all sounds rather dry; fossil bones tend to grab people’s imagination far more. But ichnology is a very rich source of information about an animal that could not be deduced from the bones alone. A once living animal is leaving a clue about what it was doing, the way it was doing it, and the conditions around it. </p>
<p>Trace fossils even preserve moulds and casts of body parts – for instance, a fossil footprint can be thought of as a partial 3D mould of the animal’s foot, its flesh and bone. </p>
<p>My current work in ichnology deals with fossil footprints (tracks) of one of the largest animals to have walked the earth: <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2022.805442/full">the sauropod</a>. These dinosaurs of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods (~200 and 150 million years ago) are like nothing we know today.</p>
<p>Some, like the <a href="https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/orientation-center/the-titanosaur">Titanosaurs</a>, were colossal. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/animal/Europasaurus">Others</a> were the size of a cow or smaller. Our knowledge about sauropods is collated from their body and trace fossil records. Sauropod tracks tell us the morphology of the feet, anatomical details such as toes and claws, and occasionally, with exceptional preservation, the texture of the skin via <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00241160410002162">skin impressions</a>. </p>
<p>Tracks can reveal how the animal gripped the substrate as it walked, how fast it was moving, or simply show that it was there, especially if no body fossils are available. In northern Zimbabwe, for example, sauropod body fossils are very rare but sauropod tracks have been found and indicate enormous animals with <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00241160410002162">feet 94 cm long and 54 cm wide</a>. By comparison, an African elephant has a footprint length of between 30-40 cm. Collections of tracks and trackways can act as indirect evidence of sauropods moving together in a herd, something harder to deduce from their body fossils alone. </p>
<p>Where fossil footprints may indicate the movement of an animal and other associated behavioural characteristics, a fossil burrow is another type of trace fossil and provides evidence for the excavation of a dwelling, a refuge, or even a trap for prey (to name a few). South Africa’s Karoo Basin preserves some of the world’s <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130622154602.htm">finest and most unusual fossil burrows</a>. Burrows’ walls, lining and infill can preserve evidence of excavation with scratch marks from claws and teeth and even the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018212003811">animal’s butt imprint</a> being preserved. These are crucial in helping identify a possible burrow-maker and its behaviour. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464984/original/file-20220524-13-7ahlu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464984/original/file-20220524-13-7ahlu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464984/original/file-20220524-13-7ahlu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464984/original/file-20220524-13-7ahlu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464984/original/file-20220524-13-7ahlu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464984/original/file-20220524-13-7ahlu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464984/original/file-20220524-13-7ahlu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Ichnologists examining an area with trace fossils - a way to reconstruct ancient life even in the absence of body fossils.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jurassica Museum</span></span>
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<p>And while the idea of fossilised faeces might gross you out, coprolites reveal what that animal ate and may preserve in it fragments of fossil bone, insects, and plant matter. A coprolite might even show evidence of other trace fossils, like traces related to beetle’s borings – insects eating and digesting the coprolite while it was still fresh. It can even show that it was stepped on by another animal. One incredible example was <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871174X22000105">recently discovered</a> in Vietnam. It shows evidence of being produced and stepped on by a crocodilian; a fossil footprint and fossil dung all wrapped up in one.</p>
<p>Collectively, this evidence helps to paint a picture of long-gone landscapes and the creatures and plants that populated those spaces.</p>
<p>Another branch of ichnology, neoichnology, studies the modern traces and tracks of animals. It’s a highly relevant field of study because knowing how and why modern animals move and interact with different substrates informs us about how extant animals may have done so. </p>
<p>For centuries, humans have examined the tracks and traces of animals and plants. Today, only a few people worldwide have this specialised knowledge and skill. In Botswana, trackers from the indigenous !Xo and /Gwi nations, for instance, use their superior tracking neoichnological knowledge as citizen-scientists in the management and conservation of wildlife. From tracks, scat (dung) and other evidence of animal behaviour, these neoichnologists know and interpret the movement, sex, species, timing, and speed of animals passing through an area.</p>
<h2>Carving out a career</h2>
<p>So, how do you go from high school to a career in ichnology like I did? There isn’t always one single, linear route.</p>
<p>Ichnology often requires a good understanding of biological and abiotic (related to the sedimentary processes that lead to preservation) processes in the spheres of geology, zoology (biology), and botany – as well as in chemistry, physics, and maths. There’s a wide scope of subjects you could study to pursue a career in ichnology and you certainly don’t need to be an expert in all of them. You just need to be curious!</p>
<p>As an example, I studied sedimentary geology, which is used in teasing apart trace fossil information as it is often preserved in sedimentary rocks. Sedimentary geology can help explain how sediment and animals interact and what processes were involved in the shaping and preservation of a trace like a footprint or burrow. Geology will assist in reading the rocks in which the trace fossils are preserved. Biology and zoology will assist in understanding the behaviour of animals making and leaving those traces in the sedimentary rock record.</p>
<p>Altogether, ichnology is an important area of study that helps us investigate our near or distant past to learn from it. A trace fossil is a little secret snapshot of an animal’s day: a private view into who it was and what it was up to.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/182906/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lara Sciscio receives funding from Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).</span></em></p>Collectively, the evidence studied by ichnologists helps to paint a picture of long-gone landscapes and the creatures and plants that populated those spaces.Lara Sciscio, Postdoctoral research fellow, Jurassica MuseumLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.