Life reconstruction of the dinosaur Struthiosaurus austriacus from the Late Cretaceous of Austria. Credit: © Fabrizio De Rossi
SciTechDaily has a story about Ankylosaurs. A CT scan of a braincase of an Ankylosaur, Struthiosaurus austriacus, which lived about 80 million years ago in what is now modern day Austria, has led to some surprising new details: it was sluggish and deaf. The research was published recently in the journal Scientific Reports.
Ankylosaurs could grow up to eight meters in body length and represent a group of herbivorous dinosaurs, also called ‘living fortresses’: Their body was cluttered with bony plates and spikes. Some of their representatives, the ankylosaurids sometimes possessed a club tail, while nodosaurids had elongated spikes on their necks and shoulders. However, some aspects of their lifestyle are still puzzling.
While many dinosaurs likely lived in groups, at least some ankylosaurs seemed to prefer a lonesome life because of an inferior sense of hearing. That’s what the scientists from the universities of Greifswald and Vienna concluded when they examined the braincase of the Austrian dinosaur with a high-resolution computer tomograph to produce a digital three-dimensional cast.
Fossil braincases, which once housed the brain and other neurosensory tissues, are rare but important for science because these structures can provide insights into the lifestyle of a given animal. For example, the inner ears can hint to auditory capacities and skull orientation.
