New research shows that not all non-avian dinosaurs were restricted to land.
but the degree to which they had adopted an aquatic lifestyle wasn’t fully known.creatures, such as the modern hippo, are aquatic. TFor the study, Fabbri and his colleagues made CT scans to analyze and compare the densities of hundreds of bones belonging to dinosaurs, crocodiles, birds, mar
ine reptiles, and more. In particular, the team looked at femurs and ribs. Writing to me in an email, Fabbri said the “reason for using these bones is that they usually have a strong influence for motion, balance,The CT scans allowed the team to gather digital cross sections of the bones. “In some cases, we cut the mid portion of the bone and made very thin slices of it, to better study the bone tissue,” Fabbri explained.
The scans were imported into specialized software that quantified bone tissue, in a process repeated for 480 bones and 291 species of extinct and extant species. In an emailed press release, Jingmai O’Connor, a curator at the Field Museum and co-author of the new paper, said studies like this represent “the future of paleontology.
connection between bone density and aquatic foraging behavior. Animals that submerged themselves in water tended to have bones that were nearly completely solid, while terrestrial animals tended to have bones with hollow centers. The high“tell us that they were spending a lot of time in water and swimming underwater,” said Fabbri.
Incredibly, the analysis allowed the team to infer behaviors in three different groups of spinosaurids:
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