Vulcanodon – Early Jurassic (199-188 Ma)As promised, I’m featuring another dinosaur toda

Vulcanodon – Early Jurassic (199-188 Ma)As promised, I’m featuring another dinosaur today! Today we’re talking about the relatively obscure and mysterious Vulcanodon! Before getting into all the reasons Vulcanodon is cool, I wanna talk about how kickass its name is. It means “Volcano tooth,” which is cool as hell. It’s like a Pokémon or something.Vulcanodon was first discovered in 1972, in Zimbabwe’s Lake Kariba. For the record, it’s called that because it was found between two Jurassic lava beds. Despite how important this animal is, its remains are actually fairly scarce. It’s only found on an island in Lake Kariba, and we have yet to find its head or neck. It lived at the dawn of the Jurassic period, the very beginning of dinosaurs’ domination of the earth (dinosaurs were overshadowed by other reptiles and proto-mammals during the Triassic). It was small for a member of its family, estimated to be ““only”” 35 feet long. For a long time, this was considered the most basal sauropod. And while we’ve since been proven wrong, Vulcanodon still gives us a good look at the origins of everyone’s favorite longboys. Sauropods evolved from bipedal animals, a group informally called “prosauropods.” Plateosaurus is the most famous example, which, as it turns out, was an obligate biped and couldn’t walk on all fours like we used to think. Vulcanodon is already a quadruped. Its limbs show a mixture of traits from both its sauropods descendants, and its prosauropod ancestors. What all this tells us is, hey, sauropods looked like that pretty much as soon as they showed up. As soon as they could get huge and long, they did.Vulcanodon, as a sauropod, was an herbivore. We don’t know much about its diet, since we don’t have any teeth to look at, but it likely had something similar to the blunt teeth found in its relatives. Those teeth would’ve been used to strip leaves off branches before swallowing them whole. Sauropods were pretty indiscriminate eaters. If it was green and attached to a plant, they’d eat it. I guess you don’t achieve Absolute Unit status by being picky.Oh, and one last thing, we used to think sauropods were so big that they had to have lived in swamps. If you were raised on old children’s books about dinosaurs like I was, you’ve probably seen the iconic image of Brachiosaurus submerged in swamp up to its neck, slurping down some seaweed or whatever. Vulcanodon was important in disproving that, since it was found in a desert that had been a desert for a long time, so it probably didn’t even know what a swamp was. If it ever somehow came across a swamp it would probably cry, or something. And then get eaten by something awful in the water because this was the Mesozoic and life was a nightmare.I had no idea what dinosaur I wanted to talk about after saying I’d talk about Mesozoic animals. I considered not even doing a dinosaur, but then saw “Vulcanosaurus” on my list and knew I needed to talk about it. Its name reminds me of a sketch in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return where they list off a bunch of fake Sharknado-type hybrid disaster movies, with names like “Ghost Orca, Velociwalrus,” etc. And one of those movies was “Volcanosaurus Rex,” so that’s probably why.So long! I can’t really say what animal is coming next. I’ll be just as surprised as you are. -- source link

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