Breathing life into bone
A new specimen of a South African dinosaur sheds light on how its family evolved a unique way of breathing. The scientific article describing the discovery was published in the eLife international scientific journal this week.
The fossil was found in 2009 in the Eastern Cape by study co-author, Dr Billy de Klerk of the Albany Museum.
An international team of scientists has used high-powered X-rays to show how an extinct dinosaur breathed. The team, led by South African PhD student Viktor Radermacher, were able to virtually reconstruct a new skeleton of the plant-eating dinosaur
Heterodontosaurus tucki in unprecedented detail. They found surprising features of its ribs and pelvis that point to a strange style of breathing, where a muscle attached to the hips pulled on the lungs to expand and contract them.
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New fossil sheds light on the evolution of how dinosaurs breathed
05-07-2021
An international team of scientists has used high-powered X-rays at the European Synchrotron to show how an extinct South African 200-million-year-old dinosaur, Heterodontosaurus tucki, breathed. The study, published in eLife, demonstrates that not all dinosaurs breathed in the same way.
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In 2016, scientists from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, came to the ESRF, the European Synchrotron in Grenoble, France, the brightest synchrotron light source, for an exceptional study: to scan the complete skeleton of a small, 200-million-year-old plant-eating dinosaur. The dinosaur specimen is the most complete fossil ever discovered of a species known as Heterodontosaurus tucki. The fossil was found in 2009 in the Eastern Cape of South Africa by study co-author, Billy de Klerk of the Albany Museum, Makhanda, South Africa. “A farmer frien
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