Benjamin Russel
Pronouns: he/him
Research Mentor(s): Tariq Abdul Kareem
Co-Presenter:
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Earth and Environmental Sciences / LSA
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Disp/Demo
Session: Session 2 – 11am – 11:50am
Room: Michigan
Authors: Benjamin Russel, Tariq Abdul Kareem, Jeffrey Wilson Mantilla
Presenter: Table 3
Abstract
Animals evolved various external adaptations for the purpose of attacking (interspecific and intraspecific) and defending themselves from predators. Some common adaptations include horns, tusks, spines, and shells. A less common example is a tail club—a bony sheath or a bony mass covering the end of the tail and could be swinged across to inflict damage. Tail clubs are remarkably rare, known only from two dinosaur groups, two extinct turtles, one extinct mammal, and one extant lizard. Here, we investigate tail clubs attributed to a sauropod dinosaur. Sauropoda is as a group of dinosaurs that includes the largest land animals known. Three sauropods from China, roughly from 180 to 150 million years old (the Jurassic period), are the only sauropods for which tail clubs have been reported. This current project focuses on four tail clubs from India that are roughly 180 million years old and thought to belong to a single species of sauropod, Kotasaurus yamanpalliensis. The Indian tail clubs represent the first set of sauropod tail clubs outside China and, for the first-time, by using Computed Tomography (CT) scans, the internal anatomy of sauropod tail clubs have been studied. The CT scans were done in a medical CT scanner and digitally segmented using Materialise Mimics. Segmentation allowed us to infer various features that are consistent with the anatomy of vertebrae, including signs that each tail club is composed of at least two fused vertebrae. Furthermore, concentric layers are seen, which are more in the larger clubs and change in shape from the inside to outside of each club—making these layers useful to study growth. Evolutionarily, tail clubs are interesting because only few of the earliest sauropods had tail clubs and over time, tail clubs were lost in sauropods. By using phylogenetic methods, tail clubs can be an useful feature that helps us better understand how sauropods evolved. Understanding the internal anatomy of the Indian tail clubs could also be useful in inferring aspects of function—which can potentially be studied using tools like Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Finally, this research demonstrates the usefulness of digital data like CT scans and photographs that are not only easy to share but are also useful to do detailed studies of rare specimens that cannot be physically disturbed.
Engineering, Arts and Humanities, Interdisciplinary, Natural/Life Sciences, Natural/Life Sciences
