[dinosaur] Sauropod paleoneurological study, phylogenetic significance (free pdf)

Ben Creisler
[email protected]

A new paper in  open access

Fabien Knoll, Stephan Lautenschlager, Xavier Valentin, Verónica Díez Díaz,
Xabier Pereda Suberbiola & Géraldine Garcia (2019)
First palaeoneurological study of a sauropod dinosaur from France and its
phylogenetic significance.
PeerJ 7:e7991
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Despite continuous improvements, our knowledge of the palaeoneurology of
sauropod dinosaurs is still deficient. This holds true even for
Titanosauria, which is a particularly speciose clade of sauropods with
representatives known from numerous Cretaceous sites in many countries on
all continents. The data currently available regarding the palaeoneurology
of titanosaurs is strongly biased towards Gondwanan forms (Argentina above
all, but also India, Malawi and Australia). In contrast, the
palaeoneurology of Laurasian titanosaurs is known only from a few taxa from
Spain and Uzbekistan, despite the discovery in other countries of Laurasia
of a number of neurocranial remains that would lend themselves well to
investigations of this kind. To fill in this gap in our knowledge, we
subjected a titanosaurian braincase from the uppermost Upper Cretaceous of
southern France to X-ray computed tomographic scanning, allowing the
generation of 3D renderings of the endocranial cavity enclosing the brain,
cranial nerves and blood vessels, as well as the labyrinth of the inner
ear. These reconstructions are used to clarify the phylogenetic position of
the specimen from the Fox-Amphoux-Métisson site. A combination of
characters, including the presence of two hypoglossal rami on the endocast,
the average degree of development of the dorsal-head/caudal-middle-cerebral
vein system and the relatively short and subequal lengths of the
ipsilateral semicircular canals of the labyrinth, are particularly
revealing in this respect. They suggest that, compared with the few other
Laurasian titanosaurs for which in-depth palaeoneurological data are
available, the French taxon is more derived than the distinctly more
ancient, possibly non-lithostrotian titanosaur from the Uzbek site of
Dzharakuduk but more basal than derived saltasaurids, such as the coeval or
slightly more recent forms from the Spanish locality of Lo Hueco.