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Current Biology paper shows that mechanical differences in dinosaur skulls led to their success

13 January 2023

A new paper shows that the skulls of early plant-eating dinosaurs – although they superficially looked similar – performed mechanically in very different ways, and potentially set up these groups of dinosaurs for their later spectacular success and diversity.

photo from laura porro's research

Dr Laura Porro (UCL CDB Centre for Integrative Anatomy) is among the authors of the exciting new paper in the journal Current Biology.

The extent to which evolution is deterministic is a key question in biology, with intensive debate on how adaptation and constraints might canalize solutions to ecological challenges. Alternatively, unique adaptations and phylogenetic contingency may render evolution fundamentally unpredictable. Information from the fossil record is critical to this debate, but performance data for extinct taxa are limited. This knowledge gap is significant, as general morphology may be a poor predictor of biomechanical performance. High-fiber herbivory originated multiple times within ornithischian dinosaurs, making them an ideal clade for investigating evolutionary responses to similar ecological pressures. However, previous biomechanical modeling studies on ornithischian crania have not compared early-diverging taxa spanning independent acquisitions of herbivory. Here, the authors perform finite-element analysis on the skull of five early-diverging members of the major ornithischian clades to characterize morphofunctional pathways to herbivory.

photo of lauro porro's research

Original research paper (free article): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222019194