In our 183rd episode we got to speak with Dr. Elizabeth Rega, a professor of Anatomy and associate vice provost for academic development and academic affairs at Western University of Health Sciences. She’s also a consultant for the animation and gaming industries, and has worked on projects including Disney’s Dinosaur. She specializes in human and nonhuman primate anatomy. Here is her paper on dimetrodon, and a link to “The Complete Dinosaur” that we briefly discussed with her.

Episode 183 is also about Proceratosaurus an early tyrannosauroid whose name can be seen on an embryo cooler in Jurassic Park

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In this episode, we discuss:

News:

The dinosaur of the day Proceratosaurus

Proceratosaurus

Name is seen on an embryo cooler in Jurassic Park

Theropod that lived in the Jurassic in what is now England

Found in 1910 in Minchinhampton during an excavation for a reservoir

Found a partial, fragmentary skull of a subadult

Name means “Before Ceratosaurus”

Species name in honor of F. Lewis Bradley, who found the specimen

Arthur Smith Woodward first described the skull as Megalosaurus bradleyi (part of the wastebasket taxon)

At the time Woodward described the skull, it was the most complete theropod skull known from Europe (that wasn’t crushed and hard to study, like some Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx skulls)

Woodward thought it was an ancestor of Ceratosaurus, and then Friedrich von Huene agreed in the 1930s with this interpretation (though he thought both were Coelurosauria)

Friedrich von Huene renamed Megalosaurus bradleyi to Proceratosaurus bradleyi because of its nasal horn, which was similar to Ceratosaurus

Huene originally used the name Proceratosaurus in an illustrated phylogenetic scheme in 1923

Named in 1926 (officially) by Friedrich von Huene

Type species is Proceratosaurus bradleyi

Thought to be an ancestor to Ceratosaurus, because they had a similar small crest of their snouts. But now it’s considered to be a coelurosaur, and one of the earliest Tyrannosauroidea (basal relatives of tyrannosaurs)

Scientists re-exmained this in the late 1980s. Gregory Paul thought it was a close relative of Ornitholeses (because of the crest on the nose, though it was later found Ornitholestes did not have a nasal crest). He also thought Proceratosaurus and Ornitholestes were primitive allosauroids, and that the theropod Piveteausaurus was a junior synonym of Proceratosaurus. But it was later found the two are disntinct genera

Phylogenetic analysis in the early 2000s found Proceratosaurus to be a coelurosaur

In 2010 Oliver Rauhut and others published a re-evaluation of Proceratosaurus and concluded it was a coelurosaur, and a tyrannosauroid, and most closely related to Guanlong, a tyrannosauroid from China

Small, about 9.8 ft (3 m) long

Carnivorous, with serrated teeth

Had small premaxillary teeth (front) and large lateral teeth (side)

Had enlarged nostrils and a head crest

Highly pneumatic skull (lots of holes)

Like other theropods, probably was bipedal and had a long tail

Type specimen is in the London Museum of Natural History

Fun Fact:

As pointed out by Brian Switek and Darren Naish, “duck-billed dinosaurs” did not have duck bills.

This episode was brought to you by:

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