Episode 27 – Machairoceratops: An Extinct Horned Dinosaur Under Threat!

Hey guys, I have a paleontology problem. Supposed to be the right place for that. I hope so. So I was looking through these new papers about horn dinosaurs. And there are so many names. And so many, all their frills look different. And their horns look different. I remember when I was a child and there were like five. And I could keep track of that. But there's just so many ways that these things figured out to put together. And their frills, their display structures, I don't understand. Well, I think that we here at Ohio University can lend you a hand at them. Yeah. One of our colleagues here, Eric Lund, is a serratopsy and expert. Oh, thank goodness. He is found and described multiple new species of serratopsy. And so, you know, he's contributed to the problem you're having. So he might as well help you get out of it. And he's also worked extensively in the Cretaceous of Utah. And there have been a lot of discoveries coming out of some of these rocks in Utah. Some of the last places to really be mapped for rocks in the country have produced some of these spectacular new species of dinosaurs. And Eric has a lot of insight into those fascinating rocks and these fascinating animals. My name is Matt Boards. I'm Katherine Early. I'm Adam Bridgerton, and this is Pastime. My name is Eric Lund. I'm a graduate student at Ohio University. And I study evolution of horn dinosaurs. So I'm originally from Salt Lake City, Utah. And when I was four years old, my parents and grandparents took me to dinosaur national monument in Vernal, Utah. And at that time, they were still sort of working on the big wall of dinosaurs. And for whatever reason, I decided that's what I wanted to do when I was little. So when I set out on my academic track, I was always interested in rocks and my parents would take me out to the West Desert to find rocks and fossils. So then when I got to university, I picked my major's geology and sort of stayed with that track. I dabbled with other areas, but really my love was always with geology. And then I found out that I could have the opportunity to volunteer with the Utah Museum of Natural History, now the Natural History Museum of Utah in both the field as well as the prep lab. And so I really started to cut my teeth on the techniques that they were teaching me. Of how to find fossils, how to dig them up, and then how to prepare them in the lab. And then how to answer questions about what the fossils can tell you. And so then once I got that training, then I was able to spend more time with them in the field once I graduated. And that's when I also found Nasuto Seratops and wrote that up as part of my master's thesis. And then I knew I wanted to continue in this, so then I came to Ohio University to do my PhD. But more on the biological side. So get that biological training, get that anatomical training, and then try to mesh those two together. So I could try to make myself into a well-rounded researcher and be able to ask questions about the rocks and then ask questions about the anatomy. And then sort of figure out how I could relate those to ecology and evolution. It's crazy that one of the things that makes you very different than many the paleontologists that we've talked to is that you literally can go through the entire life history of a fossil. What does that feel like? It's actually like to be excavating something that you know that you will also be able to tell the story of. It's really great because I mean my mind sort of runs wild as I'm you know being able to excavate these things. And it's very exciting for me. And like I said, I wanted to do this since I was four. So really it's a dream come true to be able to sort of continue with what I wanted to do as a kid. So being able to think about how the rock relates to the fossil and understand the process of fossilization and the preservation of those fossils within that package of rock and then translate that to preparation. And once I'm preparing a fossil, I sort of already know the anatomy that I'm looking at which really helps me to uncover the fossil and remove that rock when I can't actually see through the rock myself. But we do have you know various techniques that we can use today like CT scanning so you can sort of digitally prepare these fossils. But if we you know, but I don't often you drop on that technique of CT scanning every fossil. So being able to understand sort of the anatomy of the fossil that I'm looking at really helps in preparation. And then once everything's prepared, sort of helps me in the research side because I understand all the processes that that fossil goes through. And sort of you can think about this as a taffinomic process where you go from finding the fossil to all the way through preparation to finally the publication stage. So one of the big questions that I am asking about horn dinosaurs is what was this intra and inter-specific variation that you can see in these horn dinosaurs. So everyone has sort of history has distinguished these horn dinosaurs based off of the ornamentations on the frill and on the dorsum of the skull. But hardly anyone has looked at the front of the face and there are small but I think key features with the front of the face that can sort of help us distinguish or answer some questions of to one why there were two groups of horn dinosaurs. Chasmosaurians and centrosaurians which have which the front of their face is quite different from each other. So why do you get that difference where they're doing something different ecologically where they're eating different things sort of helps us get at these questions. And so that's sort of where my interest with these horn dinosaurs lies is besides these really cool ornamentations they have on their head what's going on with the rest of when the body and the face. Eric told us that his interest in serotopsians or horned dinosaurs was really sparked by finding and describing the pseudo serotops since then he's become an expert on this group of dinosaurs. So we knew he'd be able to walk us through some of their diversity and how they lived and hopefully help Adam better understand these amazing extinct animals. So these guys are herbivorous they're ornithicians so they're in the same group of dinosaurs as your duckbills so on the opposite side away from the pheropods. So these were a group that started in the early cutaceous they started really small body and then by the end of the cutaceous they were some of the largest threshold vertebrates to ever walk the earth. So the key features of these animals is they have a parrot-like beak on the front of their snout probably used for crapping vegetation they got the horns on their face but not all of them have the horns on their face. Some of those horns are actually big, pachyostatic bosses very thick packages of bone and then they got that next shield or frill and sometimes this frill is ornamented by big horns hooks other times it's not really ornamented at all. What kind of food is on the menu we mentioned plants but what kind of plants these things be going after. So there are probably some softer vegetation hanging out around the delta systems which we think we're pouring off into the cutaceous seaway. I think at this time you're getting a lot of ferns some conifers and based off of their teeth probably having to eat a lot of sort of woody materials so horn dinosaurs are also distinguished by large dental battery. So up to 300 teeth in their mouth at any one time because they stack their teeth in each one of the tooth sockets and sort of replace their teeth throughout their life. So that's not to say that each one of those teeth were used to process food because they really only had one sharing surface to process the food but the teeth are so tightly packed together they created one continuous sort of chewing or sharing surface to really process the vegetation. What are they doing with their head gear what do they have that for. So there's many ideas of what the head gear is for but probably what's most likely is that these were sexual displays. So these animals were using this both species recognition as well as sort of intra species sort of courtship. So you know grow these big horns able to recognize fellow macchiro serratops or diablo serratops and then you are able to you know look the prettiest so dinosaur with the prettiest or biggest horns perhaps gets the most ladies. So is does that idea come from looking at examples and modern animals. So we sort of see how animals that have horns or antlers sort of use them and they also sort of use them in a intra or interspecific sort of way. For example, we'll use their big antlers to for introspective combat and sort of jostle with each other to try to get the mate and so these things probably did the same thing. there's not a predator component but probably not. Not necessarily fighting off a predator, especially if you look at the thickness of these neck shields, they would have been terrible for protecting, I mean, they probably did protect the neck somewhat, but actually to use it as a shield, they would have been terrible. So the bone itself is very, very thin. So if you were mediating crocodile or dinosaur, you could have just bit right through that thing. So using them as a weapon or as something to defend themselves, probably not so much. These things were very vascularized, and we know that based off of the surface texture of these things had lots of grooves and pits for lots of blood vessels. So a lot of blood supply coming to these things. And then the idea of the vascular tour, perhaps used it as thermal regulation. So you'd be able to shunt a bunch of hot blood up into this thing, wave it around in the air and sort of thermoregulate yourself that way. But another idea that these neck frills and horns we're used for is to make yourself look bigger. So you stand this big neck shield up in the air and wave it around and you look bigger overall, which may scare away some predators. So Eric was able to give us some great insight on some of the weirder features of these animals and how paleontologists think they function in life. We also asked him to share his knowledge about the diversity and evolution of this group. So classic animals, you get the really ornate animals such as the racosaurus with the whole spreele covered in big spikes, you get the probably the most iconic one, triceratops, with just the very large frill in the three horns on his face. I would say those are probably the two biggest ones when you say the words, "Seratops" in a horn dinosaur. People automatically think of triceratops or styracosaurus. So these guys started out very small body. Every, when I say small body, sort of a German shepherd size, you think of styracosaurus. So very small head, they don't have the horns or the enlarged head, no neck frill. Everything starts to get enlarged when you move up through time. So you get the protoceratops, you start getting these insipant frills, insipant nasal and eye ornamentations or horns. And then as you continue through time, then you really start to develop these horns and frills on the back of their heads. Later on the family tree, you get these two iconic groups. So centrosaurines had large nasal horns with little to no ornamentation over the eyes and then very ornamented frills. So lots of spikes coming off that neck shield. And then chasmusaurines on the other hand were sort of just the opposite. Small to no nasal horn, but big horns over the eyes and then big neck shield with little to no ornamentation. But that was how we thought this group once was. But now with some new finds coming out of grand staircase, such as cosmos styratops, we're kind of flipping this idea on its head and we're seeing that some of these early branching members of these two groups, centrosaurines and chasmusaurines are sort of a chimera of both of these features. So we're finding chasmusaurines with large nasal horns and very ornamented frills and centrosaurines with large horns over their eyes and not so ornamented frills. As a quick clarification, when Eric says grand staircase, he's talking about grand staircase escalante national monument, which is in southern Utah and was established in 1996. We'll talk more about these federal lands later in the episode. But for now, back to the dinosaurs. So that's middle to late companion. So not quite end of the dinosaur time, sort of penultimate, I guess you could say. And these guys are sort of, they're not the biggest horn dinosaurs, but they're still very big body. They're not quite as ornamented as some of the later horn dinosaurs. They do have these spikes. So working in grand staircase, we're looking at sort of middle-late companion and couple formations in particular, the wawi formation, which is got diablo serratops and then you sort of move up into the overlying compare with formation, which has a couple horn dinosaurs there. Got nasuto serratops and then two chasmusaurines, Utah serratops and chasmus serratops. So the differences between the wawi formation and the compare with in the wawi, it seems to be a little more sandy, so really big rivers pouring off in the Cotaceous Seaway and then you get up into the compare with formation and you still have big rivers, but it seems to be a little less sandy. So whatever was the change going on there with the interaction between these big rivers pouring off of the mountains being built to the west and the seaway out to the east. In 2016, Eric Lund and his colleagues published a new serratopsian discovered in the wawi formation of grand staircase Escalante National Monument. They named it Mikaero serratops cronusai and it further contributed to animals panic about the ever increasing number of serratopsians, but also to our improved understanding of this group. So, found a new animal in 2006 from the wawi formation. So same formation as diablo serratops, so this animal looks very much like diablo serratops in that it has two very large peridol hooks or hooks coming off of the back part of that neck shield, but instead of these hooks don't point laterally like they do in diablo serratops, they point more rosterly or forward pro-curbing over the frill, and instead of ending in a point, they end in a more of a spatulate or bottle opener shape, which makes them sort of very unique. Cairo serratops is a centrosaurine like diablo serratops, but as Eric pointed out probably the best known serratopsian is the chasmusaurine traceratops. So, we wanted to know how this animal looked compared to traceratops. Yeah, so if you look sort of face on to this animal, the frill is not quite as round. As traceratops, it's much more triangular, so it's widest point being near the base of that neck shield and then sort of narrows it as it gets to the top and then right at the top are these two big fork pointing hooks. So it's got horns, pretty big horns over the eyes. Unfortunately, we don't have any material from the front of the face, but since it shows some similarity to diablo serratops, we can make inferences that it was, you know, similarly had a similar face to diablo, but really it's got just these two big hooks off the back of the frill and then two very large horns over the eyes. So, this animal will be called macaeratops chronosai and I got that name from looking at these two big hooks and in Greek, there's a sword called the macaera and it's sort of a bent sword. So this name translates to bent sword horn face and then the specific epithet is after the Greek god, Kronus, who is depicted carrying a sickle, so sort of doubling up on that bent sword or bent implement sort of idea. So how big is macaera serratops? So macaera serratops isn't one of the biggest horn dinosaurs, but it would have been anywhere from one to two tons and maybe 18 to 20 feet long from tip-a-snout to tip-a-tail. So during the time that macaera serratops sort of inhabited North America, North America was divided into a western landmass, Laramedia and an eastern landmass, Appalachia and these animals were sort of roaming up and down, sort of the beaches of this Cretaceous interior seaway. So it would have been sort of the way Louisiana, Big Mississippi Delta looks today, got these big rivers pouring off the mountains being built to the west and rivers are pouring down into the Cretaceous seaway and these animals are sort of roaming up and down there. So probably quite warm, very lush, very, you know, maybe subtropical in nature, very wet at times swampy in some areas. We wanted to know from Eric's perspective what he thinks is really interesting about Laramedia and its dinosaur populations and what could macaera serratops tell us about Laramedia at that time? So as far as other dinosaur relationships along Laramedia, you think of Laramedia, is this sort of smaller continent to landmass, but really it was still a very big area and these dinosaurs were latitudinally arrayed all the way from what is now Canada, all the way down to what is now the Gulf of Mexico. So there's still a really big area for these dinosaurs to roam up and down. But what macaera serratops sort of does is it fills in this information gap that we are seeing that there's two distinct evolutionary epicenters, one in the southern part of Laramedia and one in the north, and we're getting at this by looking at the differences between the, you know, horn dinosaurs for me specifically in the north and the south, but other dinosaurs as well from the north and south part of Laramedia. And we're seeing that even though these animals are penicontemporaneous or contemporaneous in time, that they're showing differences. So this sort of gives us ideas that perhaps there were different modes or tempos of evolution going on in these two distinct areas of Laramedia. Now we know that not everyone is up on their geology, I am certainly not. So we asked Eric to tell us which modern day regions belong to southern and northern Laramedia. Mexico, New Mexico, some of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. And a bit of Colorado is sort of that southern package, southern, you know, states now of Laramedia. And then the North being sort of Montana, Wyoming, Alberta, Saskatchewan, sort of up to that way. - If you're a longtime listener, you'll remember that we covered another dinosaur from Southern Laramedia, Lutheran Axe. If you missed it, go back to episode nine, where Dr. Randall Hermes helped us understand the Northern and Southern divides of this land vest in the context of tyrannosaurs. Lutheran Axe was also found in the Wawit formation of Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. And to understand why it seems like this one place is yielding so many cool dinosaurs, we need to take a quick detour. In the United States, fossils found on private land can be sold by the landowner, which means that they could end up in some famous person's living room where scientists can't study them and the public never gets to see them. As of 2009, with the passing of the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act, vertebrate fossils can only be collected from federal lands by qualified researchers who obtain a permit. And these fossils must be deposited in public institutions where they can be studied by scientists and appreciated by the public. So the best chance we have to continue to grow our nation's collections of vertebrate fossils and thus our understanding of the past is to preserve important fossil sites as federal land, which can also be used in many other ways by people and companies, depending on the regulations set forth by the managing agency. As it turns out, there are very few federal lands that preserve the Wawit and Comparoots formations of Southern Laira Media. And Grand Staircase is literally the best place to study these formations. I'll let Eric Lund explain a bit more about why our knowledge of Southern Laira Media is only just now starting to catch up with what we know about Northern Laira Media. - Some of these areas like Grand Staircase have been really hard to get into just because there are no roads. And so you have to work really hard to get into these regions. And that's why once we're in there, we are finding these things and they're turning out to be new. And we're able to sort of fill in that information gap of what was going on during this time. The good way to put it is that, so a lot of work has been done, sort of in regions of Canada and Montana. Sort of easy, I don't want to say easy access, but easier access regions of sort of Northern Laira Media. And then the South really has sort of been avoided because it was very difficult, sort of true wilderness to get into these regions. And then once Grand Staircase was created as a national monument and funding was set aside for research that sort of allowed sort of the world of geology and paleontology and biology and ecology to sort of open up in this region and give researchers access to the region. So really when you think about it, sort of Southern part of Laira Media is still a true wilderness. It's still very difficult to get around. There's not too many roads to give researchers access. So once you do get in there, you got to work really hard. - So clearly, there's more work to be done in this area as it is so relatively unexplored. Eric shared some more specific reasons on why this is such a rich and important area to continue exploring for him. - If you look at where Diablo Saratops is from the Huawei, it occurs in the lower middle member. So right around that 80 million year sort of time frame and then there's nothing until you get up into the comparewitz, which is about 76, 75 million years and you get Nasuto Saratops. So Makiro Saratops is sort of fitting, sliding in right in the middle of this, about 78, 77 million years ago, sort of helping us see how the transition from Diablo to Nasuto is sort of happening and some of the characters that these animals are retaining or developing new. And it sort of seems that there may have been some sort of evolutionary stabilizing factor going on because the really besides the orientation and shape of the big hooks on the frill of Makiro Saratops, overall the dinosaur is not changing that much. Until you get to Nasuto, which has a much rounder frill, the ornamentation changes instead of big long hooks, you get these sort of low chrystentic shaped epiprytals and then the horns over the eyes instead of being pointed forward and sort of straight, they sort of look like a big bowl. And then the front of the snout of Nasuto Saratops changes greatly as well. It gets a very large nose. In fact, that's what the name Nasuto Saratops means is large nose horn face. So something between now Makiro Saratops and Nasuto Saratops, there's some evolutionary change happening, which is causing the face of the centrosaurine to get much bigger, it's changing the frill ornaments as well as the ornaments over the eye. So this is a centrosaurine. - Yeah, so Makiro Saratops is in that group of dinosaurs called centrosaurines. We have yet to find a chasmusaurine this late in time. And that's one of the questions that I would love to answer is why do you have to wait till the comparewets? So 76, 75 million years to finally get chasmusaurines. Where were chasmusaurines way back 80 million years roaming around with Diablo and Makiro? - Not only would further collecting it in the Grand Staircase Escola and Tammational Monument potentially answer these questions on Saratopsian evolution, but Eric pointed out that Makiro Saratops is only known from one individual. And working more in this formation could yield more individuals. - Well, you hope to again validate what you're calling as valid features as true things, but then you also hope to look at sort of variation in trust-specific variations, see how individual animals within this group, how they differed as far as how these horns over the eyes looked or how the horns over the frill look. So there's still other questions if you find more animals, one validation, and then two, actually get at questions of variation within one species and then variation with a cross species. - And further sampling of these formations would not only help us answer questions about Saratopsian evolution, but about other groups of dinosaurs as well. - Are there other groups of dinosaurs that weren't sampled in the wild weave that are now part of the comparewits? - So you get sort of hadrosaurs, so the hadrosaurs from the wild weave seem to be a bit different than in the comparewits as well. So we have a non-crested form, a christivist from the wild weave formation, and then as you get up into the comparewits, you get this sort of, I don't wanna say crested, 'cause it didn't have a crest like paraceralifice, but it did have a large nasal bump. You get a gripposaurus monumentensis, which has this very large sort of hump on its nose, and we don't find that particular dinosaur in the wild weave. So there is even within different groups of dinosaurs, we have this division between the animals in the wild weave and the animals in the comparewits. - It is still more defined, right? - There is, but just wanna just draw attention to, actually, how little we know about what these animals are doing. So we got diabolous serratops from lower in the unit, as well as lythernex, but as we're going up through this package of rock in the wild weave formation, like we're finding fossils, and they're creating a picture for us, and it seems to be new, so we just need to do more of it to actually fill out that picture of what's going on, ecologically, evolutionarily, with these animals, because then you jump up into the comparewits formation, and you seem to get a different set of animals. But then again, sort of these southern animals are different than the animals you find from the north. So what was going on there? Something must have been either separating these things or you get these two centers of evolution going on with these animals. So still really big questions, and sort of finding macaeratops, just sort of enforces those questions, and lets us know that we know very little about what was going on during this time. - Now listeners, since this interview was recorded, there have been some changes. In 2017, a presidential proclamation made large cuts to Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, including the site where macaeratops was found. This proclamation made even larger cuts to bears ears national monument, which also includes significant fossil sites. The professional society to which all three of us, as well as Eric Blond, belong, the Society of British Paleontology, has joined with Native American tribes, environmentalists, and other groups in filing a lawsuit against this decision. Despite this pending legal challenge, it was also announced in June 2018 that a Canadian company acquired mining rights to a portion of Grand Staircase that was proposed to be cut by the proclamation, which means that they could start mining through and destroying triassic fossils. We know that you don't come the past time to hear about politics, but as members of the Society of Rigorate Paleontology, we are ethically bound to stand for the protection of Rigorate fossils, and it's impossible to tell the story of a fossil found in Grand Staircase while ignoring the current situation. With that being said, we are hopeful that the proposed cuts to this National Monument will be withdrawn so that researchers can continue to discover new species and spectacular fossils that can be enjoyed by everyone. - Wow, it's just amazing how, how much. much more we can know now about these horn dinosaurs, not only in terms of, you know, how they're related to each other, but also just their diversity, you know, discoveries in all these new places, like the Waweep formation, like the Kaparoids formation in Utah. Eric, thanks for taking the time to sit down with us. I, you know, I learned a lot about Fair Topsy and I'm hoping Adam is feeling a little bit better about his Fair Topsy and Confusion. I think I'm just okay with being confused now. I think that Confusion derives from this incredible diversity that paleonticala desire and covering. Yeah, we're in the middle of a huge discovery period. We're not really going to know how it all fits together for a long time. And so, there's a lot more to discover and a lot more pieces to fit into the bigger story of how these animals evolved and what kind of diversity was even possible. For images of McHara Saratops and the other horn dinosaurs that Eric London has discovered and some other ones related to them, visit passtime.org. We will have links to articles about Grand Starcase Escalante National Monument and the issues surrounding ownership of vertebrate fossils, these irreplaceable pieces of our shared natural history. Also, follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates from the world of paleontology. And with that, my name's Matt Bords. My name's Captain Early. I'm Adam Pritchard and we'll see you next time on passtime.