Sarmientosaurus musacchioi is part of a group of dinosaurs known as titanosaurs, and Lawrence Witmer and Ryan Ridgely helped provide insight into the new species.
Scientists from Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine are part of an international team that helped discover a new dinosaur species and shed some light on the extinction of dinosaurs.
Anatomy Professor Lawrence Witmer and OU-HCOM Research Associate Ryan Ridgely helped provide insight about Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, the new species.
“It’s a new species, so we’re interested in learning what that’s all about, but we’re also looking to understand it in its sort of evolutionary context,” Witmer said, noting the dinosaur species was named after a town in Argentina.
The OU-HCOM scientists weren’t involved in the original field work, which was done in Patagonia, Argentina, during the 1990s. The field team collected a skull and part of a neck of a long-necked sauropod dinosaur. Sauropods were long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs.
“What it tells us is … these dinosaurs are kind of the last generation of the long-necked sauropod dinosaurs,” Ridgely said.
Previously, there had only been three known skulls of the last long-necked dinosaurs, Ridgely said.
“It gives us kind of a critical insight into another group of these dinosaurs and kind of shows that what we thought traditionally was a gradual extinction of the dinosaurs,” Ridgely said. “It was actually probably more sudden than anything.”
It is not the first time Witmer and Ridgely have worked with scientists from around the world to understand new species of dinosaurs. They collaborated with scientists in Australia to investigate the skull of an armored dinosaur found in 1989, now called Kunbarrasaurus, according to a previous Post report.
The most recent discovery, Sarmientosaurus, is part of a group of dinosaurs known as titanosaurs, Witmer said.
Titanosaurs, a group of herbivores, are said to be the biggest creature to walk the Earth, according to PBS.
“This animal … had the head about the size of a horse … so relativity small head for such a large animal,” Witmer said.
The OU-HCOM scientists discovered Sarmientosaurus had a small brain but relatively good vision, Witmer said, noting the pair of OU-HCOM scientists were involved for about seven or eight years.
After the fossil was collected, it went through a CT scan at a hospital in Argentina. The CT scan of the fossil was sent digitally to the OU-HCOM scientists, Witmer said.
“I was brought in as sort of an expert on dinosaur skull anatomy,” he said.
With the CT scan and the help of an X-ray technique, Witmer said he and Ridgely were able to look inside the skull and through the bone.
“We were able to look at the anatomical structures of the skull in unprecedented detail,” Witmer said. “Also, we were able to get in and start to understand the brain and the sensory systems, and that’s probably some of the major contribution that Ryan and I made to this project.”
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Even though the fossil discovery was made in Argentina, the OU-HCOM scientists were able to do all their work in Athens, Witmer said.
“We were part of the team that helped them really understand what was happening inside and kind of put their fossil in place,” Ridgely said.
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