theme months – Page 9 – Nix Illustration

Retro vs Modern #03: Hylaeosaurus armatus

Despite being the third-ever scientifically named dinosaur genus, and being used in the first official definition of dinosaurs as a group, Hylaeosaurus armatus has ended up as a much less well-known name than Iguanodon or even Megalosaurus.

It was also the very first ankylosaur to be discovered, found as a partial skeleton in Southeast England in the early 1830s. Its large bony spikes were quickly recognized as being some sort of defensive armor, initially thought to be arranged in a vertical row along the animal’s back and tail.

1850s

The Victorian Crystal Palace statue of Hylaeosaurus is surprisingly decent for such an early attempt at reconstructing something as weird as an ankylosaur. It gives the impression of a slower and much more lizard-like animal than Iguanodon or Megalosaurus, showing it as a large squat quadruped with hoof-like claws and heavily armored scaly skin, with long spines running along its back and numerous smaller bony bumps over its head and sides.

1860s-1920s

Discoveries of other more complete armored dinosaurs began to give a better picture of what ankylosaurs actually looked like. But although Hylaeosaurus was soon recognized as having had multiple rows of spikes rather than just one, actual reconstructions of it seem to have been scarce during this period – mostly all derivative of a single 1869 image that depicted it as a sort of fat sprawling pinecone-lizard bristling with spikes.

2020s

Still only known from fragmentary material, Hylaeosaurus has remained rather obscure for a long time. In the 21^st century it’s started to get a bit more attention, however, with the original specimen being further prepared and examined – and 2020 was Hylaeosaurus’ big year, with both a redescription of the genus being published and it also being featured on a special-edition British 50p coin.

Hylaeosaurus was probably around 4m long (~13′), and lived in southeast England about 140-136 million years ago. It may have also ranged further across Europe, with possible remains known from Germany and some more dubious records from France, Spain, and Romania. Generally classified as an early nodosaurid, most of our modern knowledge of what it would have looked like comes from other discoveries of much better-known ankylosaurian relatives, including some exquisitely well-preserved examples in the last few years like Borealopelta and Zuul.

It would have had a low triangular head, with a toothless beak at the front of its jaws and leaf-shaped teeth further back, and a pair of short horns on the back of its skull behind its eyes. Rows of spiky osteoderm armor ran along is body, with longer curving spines over its shoulders, all covered in thick keratin sheaths that would have made them look even larger in life. Numerous smaller bony nodules in its skin filled in the gaps between the armor, forming a tough protective shield over its entire back. Its short powerful limbs had hoof-like claws, and if it was indeed a nodosaurid its tail would have lacked the famous club of its ankylosaurid cousins.

Based on Borealopelta we even now know a little bit about the potential coloration and patterning of these animals – some of them were reddish-colored, with a countershaded camouflage pattern, darker on top and lighter on the underside.

Retro vs Modern #02: Iguanodon bernissartensis

Named just a year after Megalosaurus, in 1825, Iguanodon has remained a fairly iconic dinosaur ever since.

Discovered in a different region of Southeast England, its fossilized teeth were soon recognized as being similar to those of modern iguanas – but much much larger. Partial skeletal remains were initially reconstructed as belonging to a gigantic herbivorous lizard, with what was thought to be a horn placed on the tip of its nose.

1850s

The Victorian Crystal Palace statues of Iguanodon depicts a more bulky reptile with a nose horn, a toothless beak at at the front of its jaws, scaly skin, thick upright legs and hoof-like claws. Much like the Megalosaurus of the time it’s really not nearly so bad of a reconstruction as it’s often accused of being, showing a surprisingly naturalistic and almost mammal-like interpretation of these animals compared to later portrayals.

Technically the particular “Iguanodon” species at Crystal Palace has more recently been renamed Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, but it was considered to be Iguanodon at the time so it’s included here anyway.

1880s-1960s

A massive discovery of the remains of nearly 40 Iguanodon individuals in a coal mine in Bernissart, Belgium, revealed the full anatomy of these dinosaurs for the first time. Much more well-preserved and complete than the patchy English material, these larger Iguanodon bernissartensis eventually became the official type species for the whole genus – a standard used to help determine whether similar-looking fossils are Iguanodon or not.

The Bernissart specimens were restored as bipedal animals in an upright kangaroo-like pose, with their tails dragging behind them acting like a tripod to prop them up. What had previously been the single “horn” was finally realized to instead be a thumb spike on each hand, interpreted as a defensive weapon against predators.

This image of Iguanodon persisted for decades, with a giraffe-like long prehensile tongue sometimes also depicted (including a particularly bizarre interpretation of it sticking out through a hole in the lower jaw!).

2020s

The Dinosaur Renaissance in the late 20^th century corrected Iguanodon‘s posture to hold its body horizontally, and it was eventually recognized as being capable of both bipedal and quadrupedal movement. Juveniles were found to have walked more on their hindlimbs, while adults spent more time on all fours but were still capable of running bipedally when they needed to.

We now have fossils of Iguanodon from across much of Europe during the Early Cretaceous, about 126-122 million years ago. Our modern view of this animal is a heavily built ornithopod that grew to around 9m long (~30′), with a horse-like head, a large keratinous beak at the front of its jaws, chewing teeth further back, and cheeks covering the sides of its mouth. Its chunky forelimbs each had a large thumb spike, hoof-like claws, and a prehensile grasping pinky finger, while its powerful hindlimbs ended in three-toed vaguely bird-like feet.

Soft tissue preservation discovered in related hadrosaurs suggests it probably also had a very bulky body with a thick heavily muscled neck and tail, and possibly an ornamental “frill” running along its back. Skin impressions show a covering of numerous tiny pebbly scales, generally too small to have been visible from a distance.

Retro vs Modern #01: Megalosaurus bucklandii

It’s time for Retro vs Modern Month!

Every weekday this March we’ll be looking at some examples of how our paleontological understanding and visual depiction of various fossil creatures has evolved over the years.

Starting with…

Retro vs Modern #01: Megalosaurus bucklandii

Fragmentary fossil remains of dinosaurs have been found in Southeast England for hundreds of years, but it wasn’t until the 1820s that they were properly recognized as belonging to an ancient “great lizard” given the name Megalosaurus bucklandii – the very first non-avian dinosaur known to science, almost two decades before the term “dinosaur” would even be created to categorize these extinct animals.

1850s

The Victorian Crystal Palace reconstruction of Megalosaurus is often mocked for its inaccurate bulky appearance, but for its time it was actually an incredibly progressive vision of a predatory dinosaur. It was depicted as an alert, active, bear-like beast with upright muscular limbs, and a humped back based on what later turned out to actually be remains of a different dinosaur species.

1890s-1960s

Discoveries of other large theropod dinosaurs revealed their bipedal posture, and Megalosaurus reconstructions were revised to show an upright kangaroo-like stance. But despite some other early portrayals of active agile dinosaurs, the overall opinion of these animals began to drift during the first half of the 20^th century towards sluggish tail-dragging reptiles: depicting them as slow, stupid, cold-blooded, awkward and obsolete evolutionary failures whose extinction had been inevitable.

2020s

Starting in the late 1960s the Dinosaur Renaissance finally began to shift thinking back towards active and warm-blooded dinosaurs, recognizing theropods’ close evolutionary relationship to modern birds and correcting their posture into a horizontal stance with a counterbalancing tail. And while Megalosaurus itself is still only known from fragments, discoveries of more completely preserved relatives like Torvosaurus have given us a much better idea of what it was probably like.

We know know Megalosaurus lived on what at the time was a subtropical island in the shallow western Tethys Sea, about 166 million years ago during the Mid Jurassic. It would have been around 8m long (~26′), with a long narrow snout, and short muscular arms with enlarged meathook-like thumb claws. Its legs and tail would have been fairly thick and bulky, and it may have had a covering of hair-like protofeathers on its body.

Cambrian Explosion #61: Crustacea – Little Wigglers

We’re finally at the end of this series, and to finish off let’s look at one of the few types of Cambrian true crustaceans that are known only from fully mature adults: the skaracarids.

These tiny soft-bodied meiofaunal animals are known from late Cambrian areas of “Orsten-type preservation” in Sweden and South China, with a possible additional fragmentary occurrence in Poland – suggesting that they had a global distribution.

Cambrian Explosion #60: Crustacea – Larvae Larvae Everywhere

One of the characteristic features of the crustacean lineage are their larval forms, passing through various tiny larval stages. They often look nothing like their eventual adult forms and historically weren’t even recognized as being the same species, with their complex lifecycles not being properly recognized until the late 1800s.

A lot of Cambrian crustaceans are only known from their larvae, preserved in exquisite microscopic detail in sites of “Orsten-type preservation”. Only disarticulated fragments of larger-bodied forms have been found in a few places, and it isn’t until much later in the Paleozoic that fossil crustaceans actually seem to become abundant in marine ecosystems.

It’s not clear why there’s such a bias in their early fossil record compared to most other arthropods, but possibly they were just very very rare animals early on. Adult forms may have mostly lived in places where they just didn’t fossilize, while their tiny larvae sometimes dispersed into different environments with a better chance of preservation.

Cambrian Explosion #59: Stem-Crustacea – Actual Ancient Aliens & Bivalved Buddies

The majority of known fossils of Cambrian crustaceans are in the form of minuscule microfossils with “Orsten-type preservation” – formed in oxygen-poor seafloor mud and exceptionally well-preserved in three-dimensional detail. They can only be discovered and studied after dissolving away the rock around them with acid and picking through the residue under a microscope, then they’re scanned with an electron microscope to see their fine details.

And it turns out some of these tiny early crustaceans looked really weird.

Cambrian Explosion #58: Hymenocarina

The pancrustaceans are a grouping of mandibulates that contains all of the crustaceans and hexapods (insects and their closest relatives) along with their various stem-relatives.

They’re critical components of most ecosystems on the planet, and are major parts of the nutrient cycle. In aquatic environments the crustaceans dominate, with modern copepods and krill being some of the most abundant living animals and making up enormous amounts of biomass providing vital food sources for larger animals. On the land springtails and ants are especially numerous, and the air is full of flying insects, the only invertebrates to ever develop powered flight. Some groups of insects have also co-evolved complex mutualistic partnerships with flowering plants and fungi.

Hexapods and insects don’t appear in the fossil record until the early Devonian, but they’re estimated to have first diverged from the crustaceans* in the early Silurian (~440 million years ago), around the same time that vascular plants were colonizing the land.

(* Hexapods are crustaceans in the same sort of way that birds are dinosaurs. They originated from within one of the major crustacean lineages with their closest living relatives possibly being the enigmatic remipedes.)

But crustaceans and their pancrustacean ancestors go back much further into the Cambrian, and we’ll be finishing off this month and this series with some of those early representatives.

Cambrian Explosion #57: Tuzoiida

What were tuzoiids?

We don’t know.*

Despite hundreds of specimens having been found, and around 20 different species being described, these arthropods are an ongoing puzzle.

They’re known from between about 518 and 505 million years ago, in deposits associated with tropical and subtropical regions all around the world. They had large spiny bivalved carapaces up to 18cm long (7″), shaped like an upside-down domed taco shell, with a distinctive reticulated net-like surface ornamentation – but the rest of their ecology and anatomy is very unclear.

Most fossils are just empty carapaces, which appear to have been made of unmineralized chitin. Rare examples of soft-part preservation show they had a pair of stalked eyes sticking out the front, and a pair of short simple antennae, but impressions of the rest of their bodies are fragmentary and indistinct enough to not be particularly helpful.

Cambrian Explosion #56: Euthycarcinoidea

The euthycarcinoids were a group of euarthropods known from the mid-Cambrian to the mid-Triassic (~500-254 million years ago), surviving through multiple mass extinctions including the devastating “Great Dying” at the end of the Permian that finished off the trilobites. But despite an evolutionary history spanning around 250 million years they have a very sparse fossil record, extremely rare and known from less than 20 species across their entire time range.

For a long time their affinities were uncertain, and they’ve been variously suggested to have been crustaceans, trilobites, or chelicerates, or even to have been a lineage of earlier stem-euarthropods. But since the early 2010s better understanding of their anatomy has placed them in the mandibulates, probably as the closest relatives of the myriapods and helping to close the gap between the aquatic ancestors of that group and their earliest known terrestrial forms.

Cambrian Explosion #55: Fuxianhuiida

In the final stretch of this month we finally come to the last of the major groupings of euarthropods: the mandibulates, which include the modern myriapods (centipedes and millipedes) and pancrustaceans (crustaceans and insects), along with several extinct groups.

Characterized by possessing mandible mouthparts, mandibulates are by far the largest lineage of arthropods and the most successful group of animals on Earth. Over a million living species are known (most of of which are insects, particularly beetles) and an estimated six-to-ten times more than that are probably still undiscovered.

Mandibulates probably diverged from their chelicerate cousins around the start of the Cambrian 540 million years ago. If the trilobites and their artiopodan relatives were early or stem-mandibulates then the earliest known fossils of the group are about 521 million years old, otherwise the first records come from a few million years later in the Chinese Chengjiang fossil deposits (~518 million years ago).