OU scientists worked with Australian collaborators to help discover that the dinosaur was different than previously thought.
Two Ohio University scientists were able to 3D reconstruct the skull of a new type of dinosaur from the comfort of their offices in the Life Sciences Building.
Drs. Lawrence Witmer and Ryan Ridgely collaborated with scientists in Australia to help them understand the skull of an armored dinosaur first found in 1989.
“We think about paleontologists and the discoveries they make, and we often think of paleontologists traipsing through the Badlands looking for that glint of bone coming out of the rock,” Witmer said. “The reality is that some of these discoveries are actually taking place here in a laboratory where we’re looking at these data.”
Witmer, an anatomy professor in OU’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, and Ridgely, a research technician in OU-HCOM, were approached by Australian researchers to investigate the dinosaur, now called Kunbarrasaurus, because of their previous work with armored dinosaurs and their airways, sometimes described as "crazy straws."
Australian ankylosaur dinosaur skull & endocast by WitmerLab at Ohio University on Sketchfab
Originally, the fossil was thought to be another dinosaur called Minmi, but the team discovered that the brain, inner ear and nasal passages were different than originally thought.
“It took awhile to analyze the data and convince ourselves that we knew what was going on,” Witmer said. “And so some of the things we found interesting were related to the brain and inner ear. It didn’t really look like a dinosaur’s at all. It looked sort of like a turtle’s.”
The lab in Queensland would send the data and CT scans of the dinosaur to Witmer and Ridgely, who would use technology in Athens to reconstruct the head.
“There’s a lot of neat formats now, like Adobe Acrobat has a 3D viewer in it, so you can actually make what’s called a 3D PDF,” Ridgely said. “So you can send what’s kind of a rough draft of what we’ve done to collaborators. We treat these digital models like we would a fossil.”
Though their collaborators were across the globe, Witmer and Ridgely said it’s not uncommon for them to work with people around the world because they can communicate online.
“People have collaborated with people around the world for generations, but it’s really become easy now,” Witmer said. “The reality is that much of the collaboration that I do with people in Australia, South America or Europe is pretty much the same way I can collaborate with someone in Pittsburgh.”
In addition to the obstacle of the time difference, Witmer also said one of the biggest challenges of this project was not knowing what the dinosaur was supposed to look like.
“The thing with fossils is they don’t usually give you all of the pieces,” he said. “In a sense, it’s like trying to put the pieces together of a puzzle, and you don’t know if you actually have all of the pieces to start with, and you don’t have the lid of the box to know what it’s supposed to look like, so that is a challenge, and that’s also what makes it fun.”
The group decided to name the dinosaur after an indigenous language.
“Kunbarra is the word for ‘shield’ in the Mayi language of the Wunumara people from the Richmond (Australia) area, and the species name honors the person who originally found the fossil, Mr. Ian Ievers,” Lucy Leahey, a Ph.D. student at the University of Queensland School of Biological Sciences and an author of the study, said in a news release. “It means ‘Ievers’ shield lizard.”
Witmer said he hopes these findings help people become more interested in science.
“We’re trying to communicate about this new dinosaur but also engage people with science in general,” he said. “We want them to dive in a little more deeply. So much of this world requires people to not be afraid of science. It’s not just dinosaurs, that’s my little corner of it; it’s also vaccines, climate change and things that require people to approach scientific knowledge with some sort of responsibility.”
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