It’s dinosaur lore that pachycephalosaurs – bipedal Cretaceous beasts with massively thick, domed skulls – butt their heads hard like bighorn sheep do today. But new analysis suggests that is far from the case; on the contrary, pachycephalosaurs (pack-ee-SEH’-fa-low-sawrs) may have moved more like kangaroos, using their tails as a tripod that could support them as they delivered powerful kicks on their rivals.
Paleontologists have found evidence of this kickboxing behavior by analyzing a well-preserved skeleton of Pachycephalosaurusby making a virtual 3D model of it and noting that parts of the dinosaurThe anatomy of resembled that of a kangaroo and moved surprisingly similarly.
“The skeleton in our study shows that they used their tails as an accessory like kangaroos do, but not that they ran around and bumped their heads like bighorn sheep. [do]Cary Woodruff, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Frost Museum of Science in Miami, who is leading the research, told Live Science.
The research was presented Nov. 2 at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual conference in Toronto, and has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
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Pachycephalosaurs are the iconic children of the bizarre-looking dinosaurs. “They have this big bowling ball on top of their head,” Woodruff said. “They have these very sharp, meat-eating dinosaur-like teeth in the front of their mouths, but they ate plants. Everything about them is weird.”
It has long been thought that these Cretaceous period (145 to 66 million years ago) weirdos ran into each other and bumped their melon heads, perhaps to fight over mates, food, or territory. And while a few paleontologists have challenged this whim idea over the past two decades, it remains a popular concept.
Although many paleontologists have studied pachycephalosaur skulls, analyzes of the rest of the body are rare because their skeletons rarely preserve well, Woodruff said. But, access to a well-preserved Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis specimen from the Hell Creek Formation of the American West meant that Woodruff could examine its spine, as well as other anatomical features that might offer clues to its behavior.
After using a laser scanner to create a virtual 3D model of P wyomingensis, Woodruff focused on the dinosaur’s strange dorsal vertebrae, which had ruffled ends – almost as if someone had placed two ridged potato chips on both ends of each vertebra. These frills fit together perfectly, like a pile of potato chips would, Woodruff noted. Previously, paleontologists had suggested that these ruffled vertebrae contribute to headbutting behavior, possibly spreading the forces of high-velocity headbutting impacts, Woodruff said.
But when Woodruff and his colleagues examined the skeletons of other head-butting animals, including bighorn sheep, muskoxen and deer, none of them had ruffled vertebrae. however, the kangaroos did.
The new study supports the hypothesis, first formulated in the 1970s, that pachycephalosaurs could have used their tails as an accessory, much like kangaroos do. It’s because P wyomingensis shares several anatomical features with kangaroos – not just on its vertebrae but also on its pelvis and tail.
It’s even possible that pachycephalosaurs engaged in kickboxing-like behavior. When kangaroos kickbox, they do so from a tripod stance with the tail supporting some of their body weight. “To kickbox, a kangaroo must first lean back on its tail, and once it’s braced, it can then kick,” Woodruff said.
Although this is only a hypothesis, “it is possible that they [pachycephalosaurs] could have adopted their own form of kickboxing-like behavior,” he said.
But besides kickboxing, did the pachycephalosaurs stick their iconic heads? If they did, it probably wasn’t at high speed, given their anatomy is nothing like that of ramming animals, Woodruff said. Perhaps pachycephalosaurs were more like large cows, which do not charge, but sometimes push against each other at low speed. “If — and this is a big if — pachycephalosaurs used their heads to fight each other,” Woodruff said, then they were probably “sumo wrestlers, not jousters.”
While this SVP presentation offered promising evidence for dinosaur kickboxing behavior, the peer-reviewed and published study will likely reveal more details, said Joseph Peterson, a paleontologist and pachycephalosaur expert at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh who n did not participate in the research. “It has the potential to really change the way we look at these particular animals,” Peterson told Live Science.
And while the findings are startling, they only add to the overall weirdness of pachycephalosaurs. “They’re really weird animals,” Peterson said. “It adds a new dimension to it.”
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