Wednesday 28 December 2016

These dinosaurs lost their teeth as they grew up



December 22, 2016
 
By comparing the fossilized remains of 13 ceratosaurian theropod dinosaurs known as Limusaurus inextricabilis collected from the Upper Jurassic Shishugou Formation of northwestern China, researchers have been able to reconstruct the dinosaur's growth and development from a young hatchling of less than a year to the age of 10. The findings, reported in Current Biology on December 22, uncovered something unexpected: the dinosaurs had teeth as young juveniles that were gradually lost as they grew up.

"We found a very rare, very interesting phenomenon in a ceratosaurian dinosaur whereby toothed jaws in juvenile individuals transition to a completely toothless beaked jaw in more mature individuals during development," says Shuo Wang of Capital Normal University in Beijing, China.

The findings make Limusaurus the first known reptile with the characteristic known as ontogenetic edentulism (meaning tooth reduction or loss in development). Together with other evidence, they led the researchers to conclude that the toothed juveniles were probably omnivorous meat-eaters. The beaked adults most likely transitioned to a plant-based diet.

Wang and colleagues first reported on this ceratosaurian back in 2001. At that point, they had collected just one fossilized juvenile, and they didn't yet know what it was. Over the course of the next several years, more specimens were found. But it wasn't clear that they all belonged to the same species.

"Initially, we believed that we found two different ceratosaurian dinosaurs from the Wucaiwan Area, one toothed and the other toothless, and we even started to describe them separately," Wang says.

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