#lingwulong

[mantis-yippee]

My top 10 dinos but I DREW THEM :D

(click for better quality)

Yayyyyy

[totaldino]

Lingwulong

Lingwulong is a dicraeosaurid sauropod dinosaur, and the only definite diplodocoid from east Asia. Typical for dicraeosaurs, it had a short neck by sauropod standards, and a long tail. Unlike most other diplodocoids, which have square-shaped snouts in dorsal view, Lingwulong had a U-shaped snout. Lingwulong could grow to around 20 m in length.

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

probably a stupid question but were there sauropods with short necks? cause it'd be funny given they're known in laymans terms as "longnecks"

Yep! Meet Brachytrachelopan mesai, a small diplodocoid and owner of the shortest neck of any sauropod!

Image ID: Digital illustration of Brachytrachelopan, a short-necked dicraeosaurid sauropod dinosaur. It is drawn here facing to the left, with its neck curved downwards and its long tail bent around behind its body. It has spines along its back and tail, and the top of its neck has speculative fleshy wattles like a rooster’s comb. Its body is a warm brown, with a pale belly and front legs. The brown fades to earthy red on the short neck, which is also covered with white and dark grey spots. The back half of the animal is dark brown with vertical white stripes. End ID.

Granted, it's still a bit longer than your average neck but it's pretty stumpy! diplodocoids, the family of dinosaur with some of the longest necks of any dinosaur (such as Barosaurus and Supersaurus), also contained two groups that were much more lacking in the neck department!

One was dicraeosauridae, which Brachytrachelopan belonged to. While other dicraeosaurids weren't quite as short-necked, some members of the group like Lingwulong shenqi were pretty close!

Image ID: Digital illustration of Lingwulong, a short-necked dicraeosaurid sauropod. It is facing to the right, with is tail curved behind its body and its neck in an upright alert posture. One front foot is raised off the ground. Its body is mainly dark grey, with light grey dapples on top and olive-green spots and stripes on its side and legs. The underside of the neck is striped with yellow, and the tail tip is bright red. There is a row of spines along its back, and a collar of yellow speculative feature spines around the base of the neck.

The other group is the Rebbachisauridae, a poorly-known group that contains Nigersaurus taqueti, one of the weirder sauropods out there. And that’s saying something in a list of long-necks with short necks. Not only did Nigersaurus have a relatively short neck, it also had a very wide "vacuum cleaner" mouth filled with tiny teeth!

Image ID: Digital illustration of the rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur Nigersaurus. It is facing the left, with one front foot off the ground and its head turned towards the viewer. The neck is angled gently upwards in a neutral pose. The body is dull green with slightly darker spots and stripes. The stripes fade to brown on the neck, accented with white spots. The face is a dull pink, as are the speculative fleshy wattles underneath the base of the neck.

[albertonykus]

A selection of new dinosaurs named in 2018.

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

Well, here’s a new sauropod that I for one am very excited about. Or at least, it was new a couple months ago when I drew this then saved this post as a draft and then promptly forgot about it. But it’s still cool and I still want to talk about it and you can’t stop me.

Anyway, this is Lingwulong shenqi, a dicraeosaurid sauropod with a name that I couldn’t pronounce properly with a gun to my head, much to my friend @hopelessvelleity‘s endless amusement / pain. Lingwulong is a fascinating dinosaur for several reasons. For a start, it’s the first diplodocoid so far to have been discovered in Asia. Not content with just one record, Lingwulong decided to be an overachiever and is also from about 175 million years ago, making it the oldest diplodocoid ever discovered, period. Not only does this push back the theoretical origin of diplodocoids back like 15 million years, it also places dicraeosaurids as an early-branching member of the group.

For anyone who’s not familiar with dicraeosaurids, they’re a group of diplodocoid sauropods typically distinguished by their relatively short necks and high vertebral spines on their backs, which would have looked like some sort of sail / hump / ridge thing in life. 

Here’s a restoration of Brachytrachelopan, another dicraeosaurid, by palaeoartist C M Kosemen (@cmkosemenillustrated). It’s surprisingly hard to find good palaeoart of these guys.

The thing about dicraeosaurids, though, is that they were generally considered pretty later arrivals to the diplodocoid family, only really diversifying at the end of the Jurassic and living on into the Early Cretaceous after most diplodocoids died out. Given their specialised anatomy and late appearance in the fossil record, it was assumed the dicraeosaurids didn’t evolve until relatively late in the sauropod family tree.

Here’s the timeline from the description by Xing et. al. See how Lingwulong shows up like 10 million years before any other diplodocoid like some sort of weirdo?

Not only that, but diplodocoids belong to a larger group of sauropods called neosauropods that also includes macronarians (like titanosaurs and brachiosaurs), and Lingwulong is not only the oldest diplodocoid found, but also the oldest of any neosauropod ever found. This basically results in pushing the evolutionary origin of this massive group of sauropods back at least fifteen million years, quite possibly more.

Well done, Lingwulong. You singlehandedly dismantled our entire timeline of neosauropod evolution and you’re so cool we can’t even be mad.

Also, the description of Lingwulong is online and open access, entitled ‘A new Middle Jurassic diplodocoid suggests an earlier dispersal and diversification of sauropod dinosaurs’. Does it, Xing et. al.? Does it really?

[katyvern]

Lingwulong grazing

[the-infinite-accent]

Dinosaur names and what language they are in

I’d love to see a compilation of all current dinosaur (or even all known prehistoric creatures) names and check the percentage from which language their name derives from, cause sure, most of them will be from Latin (e.g. the famous Velociraptor, “swift thief”) or Greek (e.g. Dinosaur itself, “terrible lizard”) but not only has Chinese been on the rise in usage (e.g. the ancient Lingwulong, “Dragon of Lingwu”), so has Mongolian (e.g. another raptor, Tsaagan Mangas, “White Monster”), and I’ve even come across some one-off languages being used as far as I’m aware of like Romanian (e.g. one of the early birds Balaur Bondoc “Stocky Dragon”), so yeah, I always grew up with only Latin or Greek being allowed but now the naming schemes seem to be more varied! Anyone know of any more prehistoric animal names that have other origins?

[theriodont]

Lingwu’s unexpected dragons

Quite recently, a rather surprising find has been made in China with the potential to significantly restructure our understanding of the early evolution of advanced sauropods and of animal migrations and land bridges in the early Jurassic.

In 2005, promising dinosaur sites were discovered near Lingwu, a city in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in north-central China. British and Chinese teams excavated these areas, in the process recovering seven skeletons of a unknown kind of diplodocid sauropods -- early members of the family that would later produce the famous Diplodocus, Apatosaurus and recently-contentious, possibly-valid possibly-not Brontosaurus.

The findings based on these fossils, which were completed this year and released on July 24th, were that these skeletons represented a new genus of diplodocids that was christened Lingwulong shenqi, “amazing dragon from Lingwu”, and in fact represented the earliest currently known diplodocids -- and also the earliest known neosauropds, a group of advanced sauropods distinguished by a number of characteristics such as an additional fenestra opening in the skull, a reduced number of bones in the wrist and the loss of serrations in the teeth.

(Reconstruction of Lingwulong shenqi, by Zhang Zongda)

This finding, if correct, will require us to drastically rethink out understanding of the early history of several major dinosaur groups.

Firstly, it means that diplodocids, and neosauropds in general, appeared a lot earlier than we thought. Lingwulong is dated as having lived some 174 million years ago, pushing the earliest appearance of neosauropds back by nearly twenty million years. As a result, both the neosauropds and several major groups contained therein must have originated a lot earlier than we thought they did.

The location of the fossils is also significant. Pangea, for the most part, broke up in the late Triassic. While the modern continents didn’t fully separate from each other until later in the Mesozoic, they had already largely broken apart by the time that most of the later dinosaur lineages appeared in the early to mid-Jurassic, and several seas and oceans had formed and prevented these groups from colonizing different landmasses.

The previous consensus was that what are now Eastern and Central Asia were isolated from the rest of the northern hemisphere throughout the Jurassic and early Cretaceous by the remnants of Panthalassa as they transformed into the early Pacific Ocean and by a wide, shallow sea covering what is today the eastern end of European Russia and parts of west-central Asia. The rest of the northern landmasses -- what are today North America, Greenland and Europe -- were connected to each other more-or-less sporadically throughout this period.

The result was that two separate faunas developed in the northern landmasses. Asia was home to early ceratopsids and tyrannosaurids, mamenchisaurid sauropods, oviraptorosaurs, therizinosaurs and other groups. The American-European complex was instead home to neosauropods (such as diplodocids, brachiosaurids and titanosaurids), theropod groups such as the allosaurids and dromeosaurs, iguanodontids, and so on. Mammal groups were also restricted to one area or the other -- the marsupials first appeared in Asia. The Euro-american groups were able to colonize South America and Africa, but eastern Asia remained isolated. Connections eventually formed in the Cretaceous and allowed migrations between these areas -- this was when marsupials, ceratopsids, tyrannosaurids and oviraptorosaurs entered North America, for instance, and dromeosaurs entered Asia.

Diplodocids, it was thought, never colonized areas outside the Americas, as most of the group died out during the transition between the Jurassic and Cretaceous, when most of the then-dominant dinosaur groups sharply decreased in diversity and range.

Asian groups were not found in North America and Europe before this extinction event, and American and European groups were likewise not found in Asia -- or so it was thought until recently. Besides Lingwulong, some other similarly “out-of-place” dinosaurs have been discovered, somewhat destabilizing the previous view of separate and non-connected biological realms.

Finding diplodocids is Asia, and finding them very early, has big implications. It means that either a) this group evolved even earlier than Lingwulong’s time, or b) and more likely, some connection existed, for a while, during the Jurassic that allowed for animals to migrate into areas where we did not think they ever lived.

(Skeletal diagram of the animal and a sample of fossil bones)

The view that Lingwulong’s discoverers are proposing in the paper discussing their find, based on both the recent discoveries I mentioned and the fact that the Asian fossil record for the Jurassic has several geographic and temporal gaps -- most late Jurassic sites, which are dominated by mamenchisaurs, are from southern China; the north, where Lingwulong comes from, is poorly explored -- is that the Jurassic isolation did not happen, or at least not as thoroughly as we think it did. It is entirely possible, the paper claims, that sauropod groups existed outside of where we think they did -- besides Asian diplodocids, recently discovered sauropod fossils from Tanzania seem to have belonged to a mamenchisaurid.

This has major implications. If sauropod groups were not limited to specific areas, and the ranges we thought they were found in are at least in part an artifact of incomplete sampling, what else about our understanding of the early history of dinosaurs is wrong? How widespread were the Asian diplodocids, and how long did they exist there? What other Euro-american groups existed in Asia? What other Asian groups existed in Europe, Africa and the Americas? What theories about the origin of major groups might be wrong? New sites are certainly going to be excavated and studied, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what other surprises are going to be dug up.

Sources: original paper, Popular Mechanics article.