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Birds, the one group of dinosaurs nonetheless alive at the moment, have developed to make themselves at house in nearly in all places, from digging underground burrows to hovering above the oceans for 1000’s of miles with out stopping. After which there are penguins, which plunge a quarter-mile deep into icy waters seeking meals.
It now appears that trendy birds usually are not the one dinosaur group to embrace the plunge-and-prey way of life. A group of researchers say they’ve discovered the earliest instance of an extinct dinosaur with a physique that was streamlined for diving. They described the dinosaur discovery within the journal Communications Biology on Thursday.
The brand new duck-size dinosaur was at first neglected. In 2008, Robin Sissons, then a grasp’s scholar on the College of Alberta, was on a dig in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert when she seen a “string of white bits poking out of the rock.” After she shared a photograph of what she had seen along with her colleagues over lunch, they went to the spot and in the end transported the fossil to South Korea for additional research. (The fossil has since been returned to the Mongolian Academy of Sciences.)
“After preparation in Korea, an entire skeleton got here to gentle,” mentioned Yuong-Nam Lee of Seoul Nationwide College, who led the expedition and is an writer of the brand new research. “The specimen was so delicate however superbly preserved. Immediately, we realized it was one thing essential.”
The researchers discovered that the fossil had a mouth filled with greater than 100 tiny, sharp tooth and a protracted, slender neck. These options pointed to a dinosaur that hung out by the water, Dr. Lee mentioned, with tooth, packed on the entrance of the snout, able to hanging on to slippery, thrashing fish.
Comparable fossils have additionally been present in Mongolia, together with one referred to as Halszkaraptor escuilliei, and scientists have debated whether or not it was semiaquatic. However the brand new dinosaur earlier than Dr. Lee was higher preserved than Halszkaraptor, particularly in a single key space: its ribs, which had been barely flattened and pointed towards the animal’s tail.
“Though the rib cage was not utterly preserved, the rib orientation and form clearly point out that this animal had a streamlined physique, as penguins do,” Dr. Lee mentioned. This made the rib cage the smoking gun: Not solely was this dinosaur feeding on fish, the researchers mentioned, however it had a modern physique excellent for diving. The identify they selected for it displays this declare: Natovenator polydontus, “swimming hunter with many tooth.”
If the researchers are right, Natovenator is among the many first dinosaurs (apart from birds) to dive for its dinner. However another paleontologists are skeptical.
“I’m all the time looking out for largely aquatic dinosaurs, as a result of I’m the man on document saying, ‘I believe there are extra on the market,’” mentioned Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist on the College of Portsmouth in England who has argued that the big predatory Spinosaurus hunted underwater. However on the subject of including Natovenator to the ranks of swimming dinosaurs, Dr. Ibrahim mentioned, “I’m not totally bought but.”
Dr. Ibrahim mentioned he might be introduced round by “extra strong proof,” like an in-depth research of Natovenator’s biomechanical capabilities and extra comparisons to different aquatic animals, together with traits like bone density. Dr. Ibrahim helped present that it correlates with an animal’s means to submerge itself.
Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist on the North Carolina Museum of Pure Sciences, mentioned that she’s additionally eager to see additional research. “The time is correct, now that we’ve got a number of animals we expect is perhaps semiaquatic, to take a broader have a look at anatomical correlations with this way of life in dwelling and extinct taxa,” she mentioned.
Dr. Zanno famous {that a} probably diving dino helps flesh out scientists’ understanding of how theropod dinosaurs, from Natovenator to T. rex to the pigeon outdoors your window, turned so extremely various, which is “the million-dollar query.” Answering it might contain overturning paleontology’s tendency to imagine dinosaurs had been landlubbers.
“Discovering semiaquatic dinosaurs implies that the ecological range was very excessive in dinosaurs, and it may change our prejudice concerning the way of life of dinosaurs,” Dr. Lee mentioned. “Greater than 30 totally different lineages of tetrapods have independently invaded water ecosystems. Why not for dinosaurs?”
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