The neck was long and muscular, nearly as long as the torso. The round torso, muscular limbs, and relatively short tail give Shringasaurus the distinct look of a bruiser.
The horns also gave Sengupta and colleagues unique insights into the life of Shringasaurus and may explain why it grew so large. They found at least seven individuals of different ages in a small bone bed. Six of them have horns, but one nearly fully grown specimen lacked horns completely but was otherwise identical to the others. What’s more, those individuals with horns show a great deal of individual variation.
Sengupta and colleagues proposed that Shringasaurus was sexually dimorphic, with the horned individuals being males and the unhorned individual being a female. They imagined that the horns were used in combat between males, making a comparison to modern mammals like deer and sheep, whose males engage in combat using horns or antlers, and whose females have smaller or no horns. The large adult size, strong build, and horns are all thought to be the result of sexual selection where larger stronger males with more prominent horns were selected as mates by females.
Shringasaurus was an allokotosaur, a lineage of weird plant-eating reptiles from the Triassic including some iguana-like forms as well as long-necked barrel-chested animals like Shringasaurus. Allokotosaurs are part of a larger lineage called the archosauromorphs, which includes living birds and crocodilians, as well as a huge number of distinctive extinct groups of animals.
Archosauromorphs like Shringasaurus diversified rapidly in the Early Triassic in the aftermath of the Permian-Triassic extinction, the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. Shringasaurus lived a mere five to ten million years after the extinction and is one of the several strange Triassic archosauromorphs like the long-necked fishing Tanystropheus, leg-winged gliding Sharovipteryx, and the thick-skulled Triopticus.
The Triassic was a unique time in Earth’s history, documenting a rapid biological recovery after the extinction event. New fossil discoveries like Shringasaurus show that the Triassic still has much to offer. The period ended with another mass extinction wiping out many archosauromorphs, including the allokotosaurs, leaving just crocodilians, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs, which gave rise to birds.
Read the original research in Scientific Reports.
Image Credit:
Joschua Knüppe
Pete
Buchholz
Senior Writer
