Fossil Discovery: 214-Million-Year-Old Skulls Discovered Believed to Have Belonged to Unique Dinosaur Species

The two skulls recently discovered in now-called Greenland are believed to be owned by a dinosaur species identified as "Issi saaneq."

According to a SciencAlert report, the 214 million-year-old skulls are thought to be the first unique species of dinosaurs which the researchers called "cold bone" in Greenlandic Inuit.

The dinosaur is reportedly "long-necked, plant-eating sauropodomorph." It has been rebuilt from a pair of skulls found back in the early 1990s, which were at first, thought to belong to Plateosaurus.

Following a closer examination of the skulls, one a young, the other a late-stage young or sub-adult, and a comparison with other most recent fossil discoveries, the study authors concluded that it is a dinosaur species of its own, an extra branch in addition to the Late Triassic dinosaur family tree.

Distinctive Anatomy of 2 Skulls

According to Portugal-based-NOVA University Lisbon's Victor Beccari, a paleontologist, the anatomy of the pair of skulls is unique in many respects, for instance, in the bones' proportions and shapes. Such specimens, he added, certainly belong to a new dinosaur species.

Using an X-ray technique called Micro-Computed Tomography or micro-CT scan, the study investigators were able to construct 3D models of the skull and pick out main differences from the Plateosaurus, including variations in the jaw's placement and shape.

The researchers aren't sure about the size of Issi saaneq, but if they are similar to other plateosaurids, they probably would have reached about three- to 10-meter long; at nearly 33 feet maximum, a size akin to Plateosaurus, as well as the Unaysaurus and the Macracollum - two related species discovered in modern-day Brazil, which are nearly 15 million years older.

As specified in the study published in Diversity, when Issi saaneq was alive, the so-called supercontinent Pangaea would have been beginning to break apart, forming in the process, the Atlantic Ocean.

Changing Geography and Climate Change

Essentially, this changing geography means there are now dinosaur fossils that spread out all over the world. Sedimentologist from the Denmark-based University of Copenhagen Lars Clemmensen said, at the time, this planet was experiencing climate changes that allowed the first plant-eating dinosaurs to reach Europe and even outside this country.

Something else that is of specific interest about this new find is that the sauropodomorphs were ancestors to the sauropods, the biggest animals to ever walk on the face of this planet, and therefore, this is quite a fundamental key of the evolutionary puzzle.

While there's an abundance of evidence for Plateosaurus, as described in NewDinosaurs, existing in what's now Germany, France, and Switzerland, just a few dinosaurs from this species have been excavated and documented in modern-day Greenland.

Now there is evidence of a unique Greenlandic dinosaur species "all of its own," the researchers noted in their study.

It can even be added to the growing list of new dinosaur species found and documented with each year that passes.

According to Oliver Wings, a paleontologist from the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, it is exciting to find a close relation of the popular Plateosaurus, more than a century of which have already been discovered in Germany.

Related information about the fossil excavation is shown on Smithsonian Channel's YouTube video below:

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