As a palaeontologist, going out into the field to search for fossil specimens is a crucial aspect of my work. Normally, I would go to badlands in Canada and elsewhere to look for dinosaur, crocodile, and other extinct vertebrate fossils.
My research interests are varied. I explore high mountains, dry deserts and river canyons to find the fossils of extinct marine reptiles, such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, and also look for evidence of the oldest turtles.
Because of COVID-19, it’s been more than two years since I’ve looked for fossils out in the field. Fortunately, my collaborators and I had collected many specimens in the years prior to the pandemic. As a result, my daily work has not been affected too much since I can work with this backlog of fossils. At the moment, I am studying a specimen of an alligator-like crocodylian (about 70 million years old) collected from the Late Cretaceous strata of Jiangxi Province, China. There’s only one complication: the specimen still resides in its home country.
In order to facilitate my research here, my collaborators sent me 3D data and a cast of the crocodylian’s skull. Examining this data has led to an interesting discovery.
Initially, we treated the specimen as representing one individual. In February of this year, however, I realized that there were two sets of potentially unrelated shoulder bones preserved: the scapula and coracoid. Through careful comparison of the 3D images in different views, I found that their sizes appeared significantly different. To confirm this, I asked my collaborators in China to take measurements of the real specimen. Sure enough, one of the coracoids was much smaller, just about 72% of the length of the larger coracoid.
So, now I had a new dilemma: figuring out which pair of shoulder bones belong to this specimen. To find the answer, I compared the proportions of each bone in relation to the vertebrae from the backbone of modern crocodylians. What I discovered was that the proportions of the smaller pair are close to those observed in the skeleton of the Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis), whereas the length ratio of the larger pair is very different. This indicates that the larger pair probably comes from another species, and was carried over by water current and buried with the smaller material.
The study of the alligator-like crocodylian is close to being finished, thanks to technology and remote international cooperation that allowed work to continue in spite of the pandemic. The smaller shoulder bones belong to a new species that we will name shortly, as the other bones preserve enough important features to make such a determination. However, we cannot name another new species based solely on the larger pair of shoulder bones. I hope that—once we can resume fieldwork in China—we’ll be able to discover more fossils to resolve the identity of the larger animal.
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