Reconstruct the shape of the braincase of a Spanish titanosaurus – Digital Today (Dominican Republic)

reconstruct the shape of the braincase of a Spanish titanosaurus

Madrid. An international team of scientists reconstructed the shape of the braincase of a titanosaurus found in a Spanish site in 2007 and lived 72 million years ago.

The scientists, led by the Superior Council Scientific Research (CSIC) studied the skull, that is, the set of bones that give shelter to the brain, in addition to all the nerves of skulls carotid artery and the labyrinth of the inner ear of this specimen discovered at the site of Lo Hueco in the province of Cuenca (center).

The specimen, which belongs to the group of titanosaurs, is the most complete described in Europe so far.

“The fossil have analyzed is particularly relevant given the exceptional condition.

In the dinosaur they not usually found braincases and when they are often incomplete, “said research associate at the National Museum of Natural Sciences, CSIC Fabien Knoll.

In fact, “there are parts that in this case it has been preserved, but that usually do not fossilize, as above belly fairing” he said.

“The fact that this new specimen is complete has allowed us to reconstruct the morphology of the brain as a whole.

Its length was 6.3 centimeters, although the animal was about 14 meters long and almost 3 meters high at the withers “, he said.

The sauropods are a group of four-legged herbivorous dinosaurs characterized by its large size and present a very long neck and a tail that lived between 210 and 65 million years since the Triassic superior to the Late Cretaceous.

“The difficulty of finding skulls of sauropods is that it tends to break off and be lost to unravel the skeleton after the death of the animal,” Knoll said.

The reconstruction of the brain reveals characters that are common to all sauropods, as the presence of a disproportionately large pituitary gland in the brain 30 times smaller than the human being.

It also shows details such as the less common path sixth cranial nerve that does not cross the pituitary fossa.

“has rarely been able to achieve this level of accuracy in reconstructions of this type and never been done before in a European dinosaur,” said the researcher.

The information obtained through the analysis suggests that the skull belongs to a new species whose closest relatives would be in Argentina and India.

The study of postcranial skeleton of this dinosaur confirm or It refute this hypothesis.

“Both the external features of the skull as brain morphology suggest that the sauropod of Lo Hueco belonged to a highly evolved species, possibly of saltasauridae family, present mainly in South America” .

In evolutionary terms, this new fossil would be comparable to jainosaurus, titanosaurian who lived in South Asia. However, the formal name of this dinosaur “will have to wait for the analysis of the rest of the skeleton,” says Knoll.