Saturday, July 27, 2019

A new (and amazing) look at Dunkleosteus

All we know for sure about Dunkleosteus terrelli comes from its fossilized skull and armor.  The rest is inferred from smaller placoderms of which we have full impression fossils, notably Coccosteus, a fish that (with all respect to actual paleontologists and paleoicthyologists) I'm getting tired of hearing about because you can't take a half-meter fish and blow it up to eight meters (and roughly 4,096 times the mass) and not introduce some formidable error bars.  Yes, I know,it's the best we have. 
However, a recent paper introduces some fascinating new data. From a Cleveland Shale specimen found in 2008 and recently re-imaged with the newest MRI technology, this is a spinal column section with 18 vertebrae. Skeletal cartilage rarely fossilizes, but calcium accumulates throughout the animal's life and sometimes we get lucky (very lucky in this case, since the fossil was a juvenile about three meters long: the conditions had to be perfect to fossilize this so well.) 
I won't repost the images due to copyright, but take a look at the paper here

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