Plateosaurus: Europe’s Early Giant Dinosaur

Standing tall in the Late Triassic, Plateosaurus was one of the first large herbivorous dinosaurs, paving the way for the massive sauropods that followed.

Give me a hand… and foot!

#Plateosaurus articulated limb material from @sauriermuseumfrick is stunning with how undistorted and complete it is.

The hands and feet are simply astonishing, with all of the toe bones, including their claws, in place. Their articulated nature removes any doubt about how those bones go together. Neat fact, toe 1 has 1 tarsal, toe 2 has 2, 3 with 3, and 4 with 4. 5 breaks the pattern, but it is always a wonky toe :-). You read phalange counts in papers, but to see it laid out so nicely again and again, it was heartwarming.

The preservation reminds me of specimens from Cretaceous of Madagascar, ~67 mya, ago, yet these are 200 (?) mya Triassic bones. Goes to show how important it is to get nice preservation in the early days after death.

Many appear to have died mired in mud. I wonder if some are hands/feet only because the rest of the body was scavenged or eroded? Say the mud dries up before the rest of the body was buried, and the rest turns gets dragged away or fails to preserve.

Paleontologists liken the locality to the Okavango Delta today, where extreme seasonality exists. Elephants today die there, and depending on when they die, their bones scatter to the winds or they get buried quickly. Well, then there is the partially buried scenario, so three ways :-).

There is an entire disciple devoted to this called taphonomy. They study what happens to an animal when it dies. How do bones scatter? In what order? It is a fascinating science. Forensic teams use this knowledge today on human skeletons found. Say a skeleton is found in the desert, to determine how long ago death occurred they can look at skeletal scatter. They leave carcasses in various environments and watch what happens to them over hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Meticulous note taking done repeatedly unlocked a lot of skeletal mysteries. Thank you taphonomists!!!

#FossilCrates #Plateosaurus #TriassicDinosaur #EarlySauropodomorph #Paleontology #DinosaurExhibit #NaturalHistory #PrehistoricLife #FossilDisplay

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