Using a particularly well-preserved fossil from South Africa, a particle accelerator and high-energy X-rays, an international team including researchers at the University of Minnesota found that not all dinosaurs breathed the same way, according to foreign media reports. The discovery gave scientists a deeper understanding of how a major group of dinosaurs, including famous creatures like Triceratops and Stegosaurus, evolved.
The study was published in the journal eLife, a peer-reviewed, open-ended scientific journal for biomedicine and life sciences.
Not all animals use the same way and organs to breathe. For a long time, paleontologists thought that all dinosaurs breathed like birds because they had similar respiratory anatomy. However, the study found that allosaurus was not like this — it had paddle-shaped ribs and small, toothpick-like bones, and its chest and abdomen were dilated for breathing.
Allosaurus was the oldest dinosaur in the order Ornithischia and was one of three major dinosaur groups, including Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and other platypus. Other categories are sauropods, as well as sauropod dinosaurs like T. rex.
Viktor Radermacher, lead author of the study and a PhD student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Minnesota, said: "We actually never knew how these (ornithotripty) dinosaurs breathed. Interestingly, Allodonosaurus was the ancestor of this group, and it had these (newly discovered) anatomical pieces, but its offspring did not. This means that Allodonosaurus is a missing link between the ancestors of dinosaurs and the larger, more attractive species we know. This gives us a whole bunch of information and fills in some fairly obvious gaps in our biological knowledge of these dinosaurs. "
The researchers analyzed the new Allosaurus specimen with high-power X-rays produced by a synchrotron radiator of the European Synchrotron Radiation Source (ESRF) in France— a giant doughnut-like particle accelerator that rotates electrons at the speed of light. Using these X-rays, they were able to reconstruct the skeleton digitally and identify the unique characteristics of the dinosaurs.
Radermacher said: "The message we get is that there are many ways to breathe. And what's really interesting about life on Earth is that we all have different strategies to do the same thing, and we've just identified a new one to breathe. This suggests that using dinosaurs and paleontology, we can learn more about the diversity of animals on Earth and the way they breathe. ”