Tag: Louis L. Jacobs

KERA: Thanks To CT Scans, Scientists Know A Lot About Texas’ Pawpawsaurus Dinosaur

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 30, 2016

“There’s no relationship between dinosaurs and armadillos, which are mammals, but it is interesting that something that looked like an armadillo was here in Texas 100 million years before highways.” — Jacobs

KERA public radio journalist Justin Martin covered the research of SMU Earth Sciences Professor Louis L. Jacobs in a KERA interview “Thanks To CT Scans, Scientists Know A Lot About Texas’ Pawpawsaurus Dinosaur.”

A professor in Dedman College‘s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Jacobs is co-author of a new analysis of the Cretaceous Period dinosaur Pawpawsaurus based on the first CT scans ever taken of the dinosaur’s skull.

A Texas native from what is now Tarrant County, Pawpawsaurus lived 100 million years ago, making its home along the shores of an inland sea that split North America from Texas northward to the Arctic Sea.

The KERA interview was aired June 29, 2016.

Pawpawsaurus campbelli is the prehistoric cousin of the well-known armored dinosaur Ankylosaurus, famous for a hard knobby layer of bone across its back and a football-sized club on its tail.

Jacobs, a world-renowned vertebrate paleontologist, joined SMU’s faculty in 1983 and in 2012 was honored by the 7,200-member Science Teachers Association of Texas with their prestigious Skoog Cup for his significant contributions to advance quality science education.

Jacobs is president of SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

Hear the KERA segment.

EXCERPT:

By Justin Martin
KERA
CT scans aren’t just for people — they can also be used on dinosaurs.

A skull from the Pawpawsaurus was discovered in North Texas in the early ’90s. It was recently scanned, allowing scientists to digitally rebuild the dinosaur’s brain. Louis Jacobs is a professor of paleontology at SMU and he talks about his research.

Interview Highlights: Louis Jacobs …

… on the reason behind the name Pawpawsaurus: “It was named Pawpawsaurus because the rock unit that it was found in is called the Pawpaw formation and that’s in Fort Worth.”

… on what the CT scan uncovered: “Basically, a CT scan, you are X-raying through the body and then you can make 3D digital models of what’s recorded. We do it with humans and medicine all the time, but dinosaurs and fossils require more energy. So, the X-rays are put through with more energy and you can get a good model.”

… on how you go from scanning to rebuilding a brain: “Visualization through software is … you can see inside the Earth, you can see inside the clouds, you can see inside people, you can see inside everything. The advances in the software make digital visualization accessible. We had the data from scanning the skull of Pawpawsaurus and then from that we rendered 3D models of the brain and also the nasal passages to figure out how the air went through.

Hear the KERA segment.

Tags Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

Dallas Morning News: North Texas dino had tough armor, keen sense of smell

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 31, 2016

Jacobs said large nostrils that look “like a trumpet bell” and wide air passages helped Pawpawsaurus smell predators, look for food or find mates.

Dallas Morning News journalist Charles Scudder covered the research of SMU Earth Sciences Professor Louis L. Jacobs in a Guide Live article “North Texas dino had tough armor, keen sense of smell.”

The Dallas Morning News article published May 27, 2016.

Pawpawsaurus campbelli is the prehistoric cousin of the well-known armored dinosaur Ankylosaurus, famous for a hard knobby layer of bone across its back and a football-sized club on its tail.

Jacobs is president of SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Charles Scudder
Dallas Morning News
A prehistoric skull found 24 years ago by a teenager in Fort Worth is now helping scientists understand the brain functions of a North Texas native. Pawpawsaurus campbelli lived 100 million years ago and was identified in 1996 by Yuong-Nam Lee, then a doctoral student at Southern Methodist University.

Lee and Louis Jacobs, a paleontologist at SMU, have co-authored a new paper that used CT imaging to study the brain of Pawpawsaurus. It’s the first time we’ve seen inside the Pawpawsaurus skull, as few studies have been done on the endocranial anatomy — scientist-speak for brain and skull — of its biological family.

This North Texas dino is named for the Paw Paw Formation, a geological feature where fossils are found in Texas. It lived on the shores of an inland sea that stretched from the Gulf coast to the Arctic. Think the Narrow Sea from Game of Thrones. Dallas is somewhere around Valyria. Arizona is Dorne.

Pawpawsaurus was a herbivore with armored plates on its back and eyelids, but without the clubbed tail characteristic of its younger cousin, Ankylosaurus. It didn’t have the stable vision of Ankylosaurus that helped it wield the clubbed tail. And although Pawpawsaurus had impressive sensory ability compared to its contemporaries, it was still less-evolved than Ankylosaurus.

Read the full story.

Tags Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

Live Science: Dino Senses: Ankylosaurus Cousin Had a Super Sniffer

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 26, 2016

Louis Jacobs is co-author of a new analysis of the Cretaceous dinosaur Pawpawsaurus based on the first CT scans ever taken of the dinosaur’s skull.

Science journalist Laura Geggel covered the research of SMU Earth Sciences Professor Louis L. Jacobs in her article “Dino Senses: Ankylosaurus Cousin Had a Super Sniffer.”

Pawpawsaurus campbelli is the prehistoric cousin of the well-known armored dinosaur Ankylosaurus, famous for a hard knobby layer of bone across its back and a football-sized club on its tail.

Jacobs is president of SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Laura Geggel
Live Science
The armored cousin of the Ankylosaurus dinosaur didn’t have a football-size club on its tail, but it did have a super sense of smell, said scientists who examined its skull.

The Cretaceous-age Pawpawsaurus campbelli walked on all fours and lived in ancient Texas about 100 million years ago, the researchers said. It was an earlier version, so to speak, of the heavily armored Ankylosaurus, which lived about 35 million years later, they said.

But even without an impressive tail club, P. campbelli wasn’t totally defenseless. It sported armored plates on its back and eyelids. A computerized tomography (CT) scan of its braincase also suggests that the dinosaur had an excellent sense of smell for finding prey and avoiding predators.

“CT imaging has allowed us to delve into the intricacies of the brains of extinct animals, especially dinosaurs, to unlock secrets of their ways of life,” study co-author Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, said in a statement.

P. campbelli could have outsniffed other primitive dinosaur predators, including Ceratosaurus, a bipedal, meat-eating dinosaur with blade-like teeth and a horn on its snoutthat lived during the Jurassic period, the researchers said.

CT scans suggest that P. campbelli’s sense of smell — calculated by comparing the size of the brain’s olfactory bulb to the cerebral hemisphere — is somewhat less powerful than that of Ankylosaurus, said study lead researcher Ariana Paulina-Carabajal, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Biodiversity and Environment Research Institute (CONICET-INIBIOMA) in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina.

“Although both [P. campbelli and Ankylosaurus] have high ratios when compared with most carnivorous dinosaurs,” she said, “they are exceeded only by carcharodontosaurids and tyrannosaurids.”

Read the full story.

Tags Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

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Early armored dino from Texas lacked cousin’s club-tail weapon, but had a nose for danger

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 23, 2016

Pawpawsaurus’s hearing wasn’t keen, and it lacked the infamous tail club of Ankylosaurus. But first-ever CT scans of Pawpawsaurus’s skull indicate the dino’s saving grace from predators may have been an acute sense of smell.

Well-known armored dinosaur Ankylosaurus is famous for a hard knobby layer of bone across its back and a football-sized club on its tail for wielding against meat-eating enemies.

It’s prehistoric cousin, Pawpawsaurus campbelli, was not so lucky. Pawpawsaurus was an earlier version of armored dinosaurs but not as well equipped to fight off meat-eaters, according to a new study, said vertebrate paleontologist Louis Jacobs, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Jacobs is co-author of a new analysis of Pawpawsaurus based on the first CT scans ever taken of the dinosaur’s skull.

A Texas native, Pawpawsaurus lived 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period, making its home along the shores of an inland sea that split North America from Texas northward to the Arctic Sea.

Like Ankylosaurus, Pawpawsaurus had armored plate across its back and on its eyelids. But unlike Ankylosaurus, Pawpawsaurus didn’t have the signature club tail that was capable of knocking the knees out from under a large predator.

Ankylosaurus lived about 35 million years after Pawpawsaurus, around 66 million years ago toward the end of the Cretaceous. During the course of its evolution, ankylosaurids developed the club tail, and bone structure in its skull that improved its sense of smell and allowed it to hear a broader range of sounds. “Stable gaze” also emerged, which helped Ankylosaurus balance while wielding its clubbed tail.

“CT imaging has allowed us to delve into the intricacies of the brains of extinct animals, especially dinosaurs, to unlock secrets of their ways of life,” said Jacobs, a professor in the SMU Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

While Pawpawsaurus’s sense of smell was inferior to Ankylosaurus, it was still sharper than some primitive dinosaur predators such as Ceratosaurus, said vertebrate paleontologist Ariana Paulina-Carabajal, first author on the study.

“Pawpawsaurus in particular, and the group it belonged to — Nodosauridae — had no flocculus, a structure of the brain involved with motor skills, no club tail, and a reduced nasal cavity and portion of the inner ear when compared with the other family of ankylosaurs,” said Paulina-Carabajal, researcher for the Biodiversity and Environment Research Institute (CONICET-INIBIOMA), San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina. “But its sense of smell was very important, as it probably relied on that to look for food, find mates and avoid or flee predators.”

Most dinosaurs don’t have bony ridges in their nasal cavities to guide airflow, but ankylosaurs are unique in that they do.

“We can observe the complete nasal cavity morphology with the CT scans,” Paulina-Carabajal said. “The CT scans revealed an enlarged nasal cavity compared to dinosaurs other than ankylosaurians. That may have helped Pawpawsaurus bellow out a lower range of vocalizations, improved its sense of smell, and cooled the inflow of air to regulate the temperature of blood flowing into the brain.”

First CT scans shed light on Pawpawsaurus’s sensory tools
Pawpawsaurus is more primitive than the younger derived versions of the dinosaur that evolved later, Jacobs said, although both walked on all fours and held their heads low to the ground.

“So we don’t know if their sense of smell also evolved and improved even more,” Jacobs said. “But we do suspect that scenting the environment was useful for a creature’s survival, and the sense of smell is fairly widely distributed among plant eaters and meat eaters alike.”

The team’s measurements and conclusions are reported in the journal PLosONE in the article “Endocranial Morphology of the Primitive Nodosaurid Dinosaur Pawpawsaurus campbelli from the Early Cretaceous of North America.” It is published online at PLosONE.

The skull was identified in 1996 by Yuong-Nam Lee, Seoul National University, Korea, a co-author on the paper, who was then a doctoral student under Jacobs.

The team’s discoveries emerged from Computed Tomography (CT) scans of the braincase of Pawpawsaurus campbelli’s skull. Pawpawsaurus belongs to one of the least explored clades of dinosaurs when it comes to endocranial anatomy — the spaces in the skull housing the brain.

The Pawpawsaurus skull was discovered 24 years ago by 19-year-old Cameron Campbell in the PawPaw Formation of Tarrant County near Dallas. Conventional analysis of the skull was carried out years ago to identify it as a never-before-seen nodosaurid ankylosaur. However, these are the first CT scans of Pawpawsaurus’s skull because it’s only been in recent years that fossils have been widely explored with X-rays.

In humans, a medical CT will scan the body to “see inside” with X-rays and capture a 3-D picture of the bones, blood vessels and soft tissue. In fossils, a much stronger dose of radiation than can be tolerated by humans is applied to fossils to capture 3-D images of the interior structure.

From the scans, paleontologists can then digitally reconstruct the brain and inner ear using special software.

“Once we have the 3D model, we can describe and measure all its different regions,” Paulina-Carabajal said. “We can then compare that to existing reptile brains and their senses of hearing and smell. Hearing, for example, can be determined from the size of the lagena, the region of the inner ear that perceives sounds.”

The size of the lagena in Pawpawsaurus suggests a sense of hearing similar to that of living crocodiles, she said.

Olfactory acuity, the sense of smell, is calculated from the size ratio of the olfactory bulb of the brain and the cerebral hemisphere.

“In Pawpawsaurus, the olfactory ratio is somewhat lower than it is in Ankyloxaurus, although both have high ratios when compared with most carnivorous dinosarus,” Paulina-Carabajal said. “They are exceeded only by carcharodontosaurids and tyrannosaurids. The olfactory ratios of ankylosaurs in general are more or less similar to those calculated by other authors for the living crocodile.”

The research was funded by the Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica (Argentina), Seoul National University, and SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man. — Margaret Allen, SMU

Tags Dedman College, Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, Louis L. Jacobs, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

Live Science: Fearsome Dinosaur-Age ‘Hammerhead’ Reptile Ate … Plants?

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 10, 2016

SMU paleontologist Louis Jacobs quoted by Live Science for article on prehistoric plant-eating reptile

Science journalist Laura Geggel tapped the expertise of SMU Earth Sciences Professor Louis L. Jacobs for a recent article about a prehistoric plant-eating reptile.

A professor in Dedman College‘s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Jacobs is a world-renowned vertebrate paleontologist.

He joined SMU’s faculty in 1983 and in 2012 was honored by the 7,200-member Science Teachers Association of Texas with their prestigious Skoog Cup for his significant contributions to advance quality science education.

Jacobs is president of SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Laura Geggel
Live Science
Despite its rows and rows of chisel- and needle-like teeth, a newly described prehistoric marine reptile wasn’t a fearsome predator but rather an herbivorous giant that acted like a lawnmower for the sea, a new study finds.

The crocodile-size reptile lived about 242 million years ago, during the Middle Triassic period. Researchers discovered the first specimen in 2014 in southern China, but because it was poorly preserved, they reported that it had a beak like a flamingo’s.

Now, two newly discovered specimens show that the beast was far more bizarre: It sported a hammerhead-shaped snout that it likely used to graze on plants lining the ocean floor, the researchers said. It’s also the earliest herbivorous marine reptile on record by about 8 million years, they said. [The 12 Weirdest Animal Discoveries]

“I haven’t seen anything like it before,” said study co-researcher Olivier Rieppel, the Rowe family curator of evolutionary biology at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Weird reptile
The reptile’s name — Atopodentatus unicus — hints at its weird anatomy. In Latin, the genus and species names translate to “unique strangely toothed,” the researchers said. The newly analyzed specimens show that the creature had a mouthful of chisel-shaped teeth — one row on the upper jaw and two rows on the lower jaw.

“The remaining parts of the jaw [are filled with] densely packed needle-shaped teeth forming a mesh,” the researchers wrote in the study, published online today (May 6) in the journal Science Advances. This mesh likely helped A. unicus collect plant material, much like a baleen whale catches krill, said Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas who was not involved in the study.

The chisel-like teeth probably acted as a rake and trimmer, helping A. unicus scrape and dislodge plants from the seafloor, Jacobs said. Next, the reptile likely sucked in a mouthful of water, letting bits of plants get stuck in the mesh formed by its thin, needle-like teeth, he said.

“Then, they squish the water out of their mouth, and those little teeth along the sides of the jaw and on the roof of the mouth strain out all of the plant bits,” Jacobs told Live Science. “That’s an amazing way to feed. I’d like to do that myself.”

Read the full story.

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Tags Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

“There’s no relationship between dinosaurs and armadillos, which are mammals, but it is interesting that something that looked like an armadillo was here in Texas 100 million years before highways.” — Jacobs

Jacobs said large nostrils that look “like a trumpet bell” and wide air passages helped Pawpawsaurus smell predators, look for food or find mates.

Louis Jacobs is co-author of a new analysis of the Cretaceous dinosaur Pawpawsaurus based on the first CT scans ever taken of the dinosaur’s skull.

Pawpawsaurus’s hearing wasn’t keen, and it lacked the infamous tail club of Ankylosaurus. But first-ever CT scans of Pawpawsaurus’s skull indicate the dino’s saving grace from predators may have been an acute sense of smell.

SMU paleontologist Louis Jacobs quoted by Live Science for article on prehistoric plant-eating reptile

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