What the Hell is Drepanosaurus
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 พ.ย. 2022
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Drepanosaurus and its relatives were bizarre, with strange adaptations we don't fully understand yet. But we at least have pieces about how they would have lived, and by putting those pieces together the puzzle of the strangest arms in fossil history is starting to be completed.
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My name is Adam Pritchard, and I have been part of the teams that described the American Drepanosaurus and Avicranium fossils. Thank you thank you thank you for telling this story! You captured the sheer insanity of drepanosaurs beautifully.
Rest assured there is a lot more material from North America that will address more of the questions...but most of it just creates new mysteries. Stay tuned.
Jeez, what I wouldn't give for a Permian drepanosaur...
Glad to hear I did it justice. Also 👀
Hey, thanks for your input (AND research!), and I look forward to learning more about these mysterious and puzzling little critters. Even if it just thickens the plot further. ;)
Question from an amateur; are there any signs of drepanosaur remains outside of Europe and North America?
@@glarnboudin4462 Not much. Kyrgyzsaurus is from Asia, but everything else is North American or European. Not a thing from these guys in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet.
I'm also trying to sort out some drepanosaur puzzles (I'm a newbie), but as Adam said everything up and coming is bringing up new questions. It's great to be confused all day.
Christmas is coming. Put only "Permian drepanosaur" on your Santa list.
I misread this as Derpanosaurus and snorted so loud I scared the cat
Honestly I had a lot of typos like that in the script
*SNORT*
"WHAT THE HELL?! PEPPA?!"
Honestly, it’s more derpy than dreppy. What a weird animal, it looks like mixed up bits of different animals thrown together.
😂😂😂
Derpanosaurus would be a very apt name for this weird animal.
I love Drepanosaurus it’s one of my favorite Triassic animals. It’s hard to choose a favorite Triassic critter though, because they are all fascinating and extreme
If I ever get to visit the triassic, I'd probably spend my entire time there pointing at all the creatures and going "What's this?! What's this!?" like Jack Skellington.
I wonder if we're missing some key aspects of the environment, like maybe a type of tree we don't see preserved that has a form that Drepanosaurus was uniquely suited to exploit.
I don't see why this wouldn't have worked fine on the conifers of the Chinle formation. There were wood-boring beetles back then.
Glad that Triassic fauna starts getting some attention.
I've put up a lot of them on the Patreon for people to vote for, they just haven't been super into them!
Holy shit that body of yours is absurd
"First of all, *how dare you*"
- Drepanosaurs, probably
They really went all in on being unique, didn't they? I wonder how long that worked out for them, and how well?
Could the claws, in combination with the tail hook have been used to hang from branches like a modern sloth? Sloths also have big claws and weirdly simplified hands. Also, although only arboreal sloths survive today the fossil record contains are lots of ground sloths, and even aquatic sloths. Drepanosaurs could have diverged into different evolutionary niches in a similar way, accounting for the apparent mixture of arboreal and burrowing species.
Looking at the paleoart picture of Drepansaurus, I was taken by a number of things. The massive claw on each hand reminded me of those seen on anteaters, though ants and other similar insects had yet to evolve when it was about. The sharp pointed snout is reminiscent of insect eating birds, too, but what also caughtmy eye was the 'sail' ( for the want of a better term) on it's back near it's shoulder. I assume that it has tall neural spines on it's vertebrae there, just like a bison.
What if, in life, those neural spines acted as muscle attachment sites for those weird arms? We might have an animal specialised for ripping open rotten logs and eating insects and insect larvae that eat decayed wood.
Little bro could have had stacked traps and lats. Now that thought would make for some rather funny artwork.
I really really like your analysis of this and I think it's very plausible! The often messy process of evolution has created some very strange and fascinating results.
Or for suspending itself from the underside of branches for camouflage.
Your analysis of the skeleton is very compelling! Moreover, it seems to be backed by the "sail" on the tail - suggesting that it was similarly "buff" around the back. Much as sloths are radically evolved to dangle, these fellas might have followed a similar path.
Probably the claw would aid in getting grubs out of holes, digging but also gives an advantage to interspecies combat or defense vs larger animals.
It's really hard to tell about intra species combat without more fossils, but that could definitely be a possibility!
I love when you can easily tell someone has a passion for something and they can't help but smile as they talk about it
That's my fave thing about science ppl: "we don't know what it is. :D :D That means more research is needed!"
2:20 they must've had fun making this diagram.
That picture of the guy holding one as a pet is great
Trey the Explainer would be delighted to see Drepanosaurus getting more spotlight.
*Trey the Garbage. Your Joshua WGarbage as well.
A lot of snake groups still have limbs, some even visible on the snake itself. They are vestigial and useless, but they are there. Its just that the group that ditched them is one of the most prolific snake groups.
Edit: so the animal had first generation bionicle limbs?
I'd be hard pressed to say things even with vestigial limbs still have them in anything other than the slightest technicality. Though, yes, some to have things closer to limbs than the colubroides have.
Fat tails are an excellent way to store fat/food for bad seasons
More of a Derpainosourus IMO. :3
Thank you for this fabulous vid!
Raptor Chatter I just like to say I enjoy your deep dive videos on this wonderful channel. That said my favorites though are always where you just introduce an animal or family of certain ones like hyenadontids etc.
Thank you so much my greatest relaxation is listening to you talk about specific animals more than anything. Its like reading an old Zoobooks as a child.
Could the claws have been used to breakthrough fallen trees and branches on the forest floor looking for insects and grubs?
Maybe. With the feet the way they are though it's more likely it was in trees than the ground though
@@RaptorChatter perhaps their food were the social wood-eating roaches termites descended from? Many species of the basal Kalotermitidae termites live exclusively in dead branches or deep within trunks in the canopy in the wild, and some estimates suggest that termites may have arisen as early as the late Permian too. These may have been a lot more prevalent before the advent of higher termites of today.
I don't know much about this topic, but I can definitely tell you have a great passion for it, and for me that makes it really interesting to listen to. Thank you for sharing!
If they were the first gliders it would've made sense for them to branch into a lot of niches, because it would've opened up niches previously unavailable to something besides bugs, without a lot of predators competition and with an abundance of food
Yeah, it's a really neat idea, especially with the weigeltisaurids potentially being relatives. It would also potentially make sense as to why we haven't fou d early ones, because the forests of the Permian were a bit iffy for preservation.
@@RaptorChatter lol forests in general usually are! I don't think they had deer chomping the bones back then but I'm sure they had a scaly feathery equivalent. Antlersaurus!
Not sure of that, why they instead didn't end up fully specialized in gliding or flight as other groups of vertebrates did? It could be due to lack of other arboreal animals, but then they shouldn't become gliders first and radiate next. There was nothing said about change in climate/forests they lived in to force them to stop gliding and become anteaters/sloths/burrowers, it'd make sense to diverge so drastically just being regular arboreal group gave more opportunities.
A truly amazing presentation! These oddballs and others you mentioned are fascinating. As paleontology moves on there are so many wonderful discoveries that do what science excels at, change. Adding new volumes to our understanding of the present, past and how evolution has and is creating wondrous diversity. I do hope humanity survives the very near self-inflicted catastrophes currently unfolding due to our blatant disregard for the environment and the warnings from science!
fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing this info
Imagine trying to explain a beaver tail a million years from now.
Especially with just the bones. It would be so hard to try and prove it had the wider tail, let alone that it slaps water as a threat signal.
Every lecture you give I have an incredible urge to take notes
Let's be honest, that tail hook is straight out of Pokemon.
Drepanosaurus fossil Pokémon would be so cool!!! What typing would it be?
I think rock/grass would be the best option. But there's a real argument for rock/flying of they committed to doing the gliding idea. It's not the best supported in science, but Pokémon could get away with it.
@@RaptorChatter that typing fits well! Also after giving it some thought, a split Evo line with a base grass type first evo, and two second evolutions, one rock/grass arboreal version and one rock/flying speculative gliding version. Why not both!! Gamefreak hire me 🤪
I always thought arboreal animals are so cool, I don’t really know why. It’s just cool
diarrhea Animals
I had to subscribe. This was a great video - I'm glad TH-cam recommended your channel.
I'm glad it recommended it too!
Love your Utube videos, great job. Could you leave the pictures you use up on screen just a little longer, sometimes I like to take a screen shot so just a little longer would be great. Thanks
Very weird creature, though it must have made perfect sense in its life. Could you add a visual , even cartoon depiction of probable motion and behaviors of Drepanosaurus? For us who find it baffling, it would be illuminating. moving picture is worth a million words.
I just found this channel, this is so cool! Onto a Dino binge for the holidays:)
Glad you like it!
What a amazing set of unique features, really want to learn more about this group.
I can't be the only person who instantly thought of God I want that derpy boy as a pet!
You are a great explainer and have obvious enthusiasm for your subject. Plus I just like saying, 'DREPANOSAURUS'; It has it's own internal meter.
Drep sounds like an old British insult i love it
It's really interesting, haven't heard of those before. Thanks for bringing this to light. I can imagine the reason behind their weirdness and being all over the place is because in the era of wild changes in the environment a lot of different specimens had to adapt quickly to a variety of different situations and opportunities, and the genome placed bets on variety of tools many of which came in handy. Once the environment stabilized, many other species proceeded on a cheaper evolutionary path of closer specialization and found environments they can thrive in better than one-fits-all swiss army knife of an animal which has a varied toolbox that can serve many purposes, but not extremely efficient in any of them.
We have a flying squirrel analogue. Now we need a stupid moose dinosaur.
I had to watch the arm anatomy part twice because it’s so bizarre!
Those arms are so unexpected!
you have the explanation and information presentation down to an art, but you gotta add some shades of darker colour and counter-lighting to the background, it will add greatly to your dynamic since you have to spend a lot of the time speaking to the camera (i'm not complaining, just suggesting). i would personally add a sirio turned straight to the background and some blueish dark elements. good video, subscribed.
"derpsaurus" fits perfectly the "stranger than fiction" saying
Y'know, for a dinosaur called Drepanosaurus, its arms are certainly lacking drip
Drepanus means sickle shaped in Greek and is also the name of a Greek city in Sicily which today is called Trapani,That's probably where the fossils were found.
I kinda imagine Drepanosaurus diging throw wood for grubs similiary to extant keas with their beaks
Excellent video! Brilliant is intrusive.
It's like it tried to form a punching dagger but forgot that you need to be able to thrust that.
The reptiles name: Drepanosaurus
Me after seeing it's name and arms: Derpanosaurus.
Very interesting. Thank you.
That name makes me think of trepanation, the way it's spelled, LOL! Still, cool video as always, RC! Thanks for what you do. 😊
❤️❤️
Ive never heard of these funky guys until now and I love them!! They look like Pokémon!!! :D
This talk makes me think about how Darwin must have talked about all the specialized beaks of the finches he found...
Damnit evolution, you had one job.
You make great videos and you're better than going to a natural history museum. Thanks.
It's weird to think we're just a bunch of bones and stuff
the way that Drepanosaurs split up into all those different livestyles and niches reminds me a lot of Darwin finches
could be a good analogy, during the Triassic there would have been a lot patchier environments, so that could lead to the sort of diversity in them we see.
When you think that the Cambrian period was weird and it just gets weirder and weirder.
I kind of imagine them hanging on a branch with their back legs and swaying, ready to pounce like a preying matis on anything that drops on the branch with those weird arms.
Describes extinct weirdness, then shows an illustration of the living beyond weirdness of the pygmy anteater.
thank you for this. I have looked them up so many times.... and can hardly find anything on them. they are legit so under studied, and wrote about
I love that we think that they’re pretty weird but then we don’t think about how we could still be reconstructing/thinking about it wrong 😭 🤚
Great presentation, fascinating science! Just a note though, you made the same mistake the original describer of Protoavis in showing the idealised reconstruction (based on the presumption that it was birdlike), rather than the considerably less convincing, highly fragmented and probably chimeric fossil(s). This tends to lead the viewer to think of it as a definitively birdlike animal when the truth is far more complicated.
I don't think the Drepanasaurus would need to have a long tongue to get at grubs (or whatever) in wood; those arms are just so overbuilt it could just ripped open the wood to allow it to get at the prey. With a bird shaped head, complete with a narrow yet short 'beak', it wouldn't have to have too much space either.
Also, not all arboreal prey live deep inside the wood. Often they just live in cracks or just under the bark to eat the nutritious cambium and sap. Even more animals live inside tree hollows or in tree falls. With the large abundance of herbivorous megafauna, there would be a lot of tree falls as the megafauna knocked over trees to get at leaves. Or the megafauna simply killed the trees by eating all of the leaves, leaving the tree to rot and fall over. My point is that the forests then were not the same as forests are now, whether it be old growth or new growth forests, even with the same species of trees.
There would not be as many huge mature and senescent trees as there is in a modern old growth forest, megafauna would often knock them down and/or kill them before and during maturity. And the ancient forests would be patchier for the same reason. There would be a lot of young and adolescent trees but less small to moderate sized mature trees as that is a product of human intervention.
Great and very interesting overview!
The Triassic really was the crazy, experimental go wild, college years of life on Earth right?
More like depressionsaurus
I laughed at my own joke for way too long
Evolution - "here's two things related, as evidenced by their similarities."
Scientists - "BRILLIANT!"
Evolution - "they use their identical body parts for completely different tasks in completely different environments."
Scientists -"..."
Most snake lineages do have limbs. They are just reduced to caudal spurs. In at least two lineages, pythons and boas there is even a pelvis. There are only two lineages that do not have any limbs at all. It just so happens that one of the limbless lineages, colubroides, is the most ubiquitous so we think of snakes as totally limbless when they are not. Bonus fun fact, snakes are part of Toxicofera which means that if they are not lizards neither are skinks or geckos.
the artist reconstuctions are so cute! i wanna lay with these guys and take a nap under a heat lamp...
I would love one of these as a pet. Absolutely one of the best options for that from the fossil record.
IDk just fun speculation. what if Drepanosaurus used its claw to dig into dead wood for grubs, this leads to some groups using fallen logs. you get a fossorial group derived from this as they found a niche (digging into the soft dirt around decaying logs leads to digging in dirt). Its stupid but meh
That could be possible. But I can't imagine anyway to prove that in the fossil record
It most likely just climbed in a weird specific way and clung to tree limbs. And who knows how crazy the weather was or predators it had...where it needed to hold on as hard as possible. 🤷♀️ plus it's neck seemed pretty flexible..so it was probably just a crazy specific lifestyle.
I remember seeing a video about the paddle tail Drepanosaur and the debate about the function of the tail, and I had a wild idea maybe it was feathered and they used it to create drag when falling like squirrels do, I like the gecko theory better, same principal, large appendage that the creature used to roughly manipulate itself while mid-air, I think the gecko thing is less of a reach though because it makes less assumptions.
What a weird lil critter 🧐
This may be a stretch, but it feels like we have a sloth situation going on, where these things got hyper specialized, then suddenly became generalists because how they evolved leaned really well into a general lifestyle.
The fact that large claws are common between the two could be telling
I read derpanosaurus and I have no regrets
Do you think that ants and termites filled the void for another species of insect that behaved the same way, but got extinct?
you mean to tell me horses run on fingers... I can never not know that lol
That one that was possibly living mostly underground[cant find time] had a hook on the tail. Wouldn't that be a problem for living underground?
Shouldn't be too bad. If it's already fused it's less likely to lose it, because there would need to be active selection against it. So if it's neutral to living in a burrow it's not going to be under the pressure to lose it. And if the burrows were wide enough it would be fairly neutral.
As soon as I saw the picture of this animal and how odd and weird It looked I thought it must be from the Triassic.
The poor depth of field on that green therapod's snout in the background is distracting.
Looks like an evil frog. 😆
Clearly making the leap to bird.
You need more visuals. You especially lose me when talking about timelines. Great video.
After looking at the skeletons of these animals… it’s hard to put it how they are almost disturbing to me. The reconstruction has to be wrong, or we are taking a totally wrong angle. The large claw has to serve a purpose and I just don’t see it being searching for a couple grubs. The energy expenditure doesn’t seem worth it. It doesn’t have a long snout that is common in insect eating species. What if it isn’t arboreal at all? When I saw the arm I was thinking fin. It doesn’t look aerodynamic at all though. Bones are weird and how muscles work around them is hard to. Is the tail not flipped around the wrong way? Looking at other lizard skeletons they seem to be turned in a horizontal direction. If it were that way, then the tail would be a very large anchor point for muscles or fat. With a tail so huge perhaps it would have to be mostly aquatic. All speculation, we probably will never know as humanity discovers more and more that there are some things that we cannot best such as time.
I think if it was ripping apart wood instead of "drilling a hole" via pecking with a beak, it doesn't necessarily require a long tongue to eat grubs. It didn't even need to be the best at it when you consider it's extinct.
It could have gone extinct for many other reasons though, and they still need to be good enough to keep a good population or else evolution would have taken them another route. And yeah, depending on how large of holes it could dig it may not have needed the tongue.
@@RaptorChatter also true. i'm thinking about how anteaters do it with termite hills. yes they still have a long tongue and its obviously an improvement but they do tend to rip apart termite mounds as opposed to just simply slurping.
If it didn't have a woodpeckers tongue maybe it bit through the wood and snagged the insect with its specialized claw like the aye aye lemur which also fills a woodpecker like niche.
Scientists: WTF is this???
Us: Cool lizards
Kind of reminds me of a xenarthran
maybe it was like the lizard version of a sloth? it might have had perfect arms/hands for hanging upside down from trees? and yes, digging wood & eating insects..
It could be possible the birds are direct descendants of these small branch-hopping arboreal dinosaurs.
Drepanosaurus wasn’t a dinosaur. From what I’ve been able to find, drepanosaurs are their own separate clade of neodiapsids that branched off even before the split between lepidosaurs (lizards and snakes) and archosaurs (crocs and dinos). So they’re about as far from dinosaurs as you can get while still being a reptile.
It is not possible.
Evolution is definitely non-intuitive. Who would think that a kangaroo could be designed to climb trees?
No, the Triassic is a world of weirdness
Maybe it ate some kind of tree sap
Modern day chemeleons have all the resemblence of some dinos.but my favorite is pterosaurs, the flying dinos,l prey they are still alive in this time 🦕
PTEROSAURS ARE NOT DINO THEY ARE FLYING LIZARDS
did they have a prehensile tail?
they probably toke on the niches of several types of modern arboreal animals.
It seems like Drepanosaurs were the Squirrels and Ground Squirrels of the Triassic.
In lifestyle at least.
Oh shit, it's the dripanosaurus
As soon as the word "drepanosaurus" cropped up on You tube my ears pricked up! I thought has it anything to do with the ancient west Sicilian city of Drepanum which was settled by the Greeks and the word means"sickle" because the beach there is sickle shaped,And I was right and this was confirmed when it was stated that some of the fossils of this dinosaur were found in Italy.Today the city is known as Trapani which is the italianized version of the ancient Greek name.
Yet another prehistoric animal that wouldn't look out of place on a Star Wars planet.
The one thing that fascinates me is convergent evolution, like how ichthyosaurs and dolphins look very similar, yet are unrelated. The bat and the flying fox are not related, yet both look like bats. Or the amphibians from the Permian that look just like a crocodile. There are countless other examples.
This has led me to the conclusion that certain body plans will repeat on other planets. After all, predators need teeth usually, and a mouth, and eyes to hunt. So, you can be fairly certain eyes, a mouth and some forms of teeth are fairly universal.
Dolphins adopted a similar body plan to the ichthyosaurs because they filled the same niche. Sure, you'll always have variety in nature, and each "crocodile" type critter will have something that sets it apart. However, at its core is a basic body plan nature has found optimal.
less chatter, more pictures
Callaghan, 🤩😁🦖🥳✊✊ New Study Says T-Rex Might’ve Been 70% Larger Than Existing Fossils Suggest-Making Them Heavier Than a School Bus! Most of us were introduced to the legendary T-Rex as children through the Jurassic Park franchise in the 90s. While they have been the subject of fascination for a lot of People, the gigantic bests also became the theme of some of our worst nightmares. Portrayed as fearsome Beasts touching a height of 12ft, easily capable of towering over any Human, we had every reason to thank the heavens that they do not roam Earth anymore. But what if we told you something that could rekindle your interest in this Dinosaur - and perhaps the dread that accompanies its mention? A new investigation led by palaeontologists from the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Ontario, estimates that the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex may have tipped the scales at a whopping 15,000 kilograms. This would make them heavier than an average school bus which weighs roughly 11,000 kg! And the study indicates that they were nearly 70% bigger than Scotty - the heaviest T-Rex discovered to date weighing about 8,870 kilograms. Since Barnum Brown first dug up a partial skeleton of T-Rex in 1902, only a tiny fraction of about 32 adult fossils have ever been discovered, giving the scientists a limited sample size to work with. However, they have estimated that approximately 2.5 billion Tyrannosauruses roamed during the Late Cretaceous (90 to 66 million years ago). They used this data, coupled with the dinosaurs’ average life spans and size differences between the two sexes, to generate a model of the largest possible T-Rex. While the study’s authors caution that until a T. rex specimen comparable in size to the one in the model is found, the model’s conclusions are purely speculative. Furthermore, this study is a reminder of how little we know about the Dinosaur, and there is a possibility that the T-Rex may have been much bigger than any of the specimens found so far!
There should be a heavier emphasis on: *the study’s authors caution that until a T. Rex specimen comparable in size to the one in the model is found, the model’s conclusions are purely speculative.*
Couldn’t those large claws do the same thing as the long fingered lemur that gets nectar but the long finger isn’t recorded in the fossil record
There weren't flowers yet, as far as we know. And if three were they probably weren't very widespread or diverse, and they wouldn't need to be so muscular if that's what they were doing
As a dino kid, Ive never heard of this dinosaur
Not a dinosaur! I talk about it in the video, but it's really unclear what it was related to. But I like the idea that they're an early group of reptiles.
Comment for the algorithm
I thought the spurs on snakes were reminits of legs?
Yes, but only some have them, and in general they aren't really used for movement. So yes, but that isn't normally the case.