RESEARCH

Breathing life into old bones

FOR YEARS PALAEONTOLOGISTS had little, if any, insight into how the Ornithischians — herbivorous dinosaurs like Triceratops and Stegosaurus — breathed.

But, thanks to a well-preserved skeleton of a Heterodontosaurus tucki dinosaur, which was discovered in a dry riverbed on an Eastern Cape farm in 2009 and which has been nicknamed Tucky, and a particle accelerator at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, all of that has now changed.

An international team, led by alumnus Viktor Radermacher (BSc 2017, BSc Hons 2018, MSc 2020) was able to virtually reconstruct a new skeleton of the relatively small dinosaur in detail. Radermacher is a doctoral student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Minnesota in the US.

After years of research, which involved flying Tucky’s remains to France in 2016, the team’s findings were published in a peer review journal eLife.

Not all animals breathe the same. Mammals breathe using a diaphragm, lizards use rib movements and birds rely on “rocking” of their breastbone. Birds have air sacs outside their lungs that pump oxygen in, and their lungs don’t actually move. For a long time, palaeontologists assumed that all dinosaurs breathed like birds, since they had similar breathing anatomy. This study, however, found that Heterodontosaurus did not – it instead had paddle-shaped ribs and small, toothpick-like bones, and expanded both its chest and belly to breathe. This type of breathing resembles the respiration of certain reptiles, like crocodiles.

Radermacher says the discovery is vital to join dozens of research dots throughout the palaeontological world.

“This represents a turning point in understanding how dinosaurs evolved. This will help for future discoveries. I feel like Peter Pan with this amazing discovery.”

Image: Viktor Radermacher