Researchers have identified a new species of dwarf dinosaur in western Romania and have named it Transylvanosaurus platycephalus, or in layman’s terms, a “flat-headed reptile from Transylvania.”
As reported by CNN, experts from the University of Tübingen published their findings in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in November. The team shared new details about the prehistoric creature after a closer examination of its skull bone fragments, which were unearthed in a riverbed in the Transylvanian territory of Haţeg Basin in 2007.
Image credit: Felix Augustin/Peter Nickolaus/Dylan Bastiaans
As shown in the illustration depicting the Transylvanosaurus platycephalus, the species had some very distinctive features that set it apart from its other roaming relatives. For one, they were relatively small for a dinosaur, only reaching a body size of around 2 meters long, hence the group’s “dwarf dinosaur” categorization.
This discovery offers further support to what biologists call the “island rule,” a theory that suggests large animals become stunted in their growth when isolated on islands while smaller species grow larger. The reason for the opposing rates of evolution is unknown, but it’s thought that a shortage of resources on the island could be a contributing factor.
“Almost every terrestrial animal on this island was pretty small,” study coauthor Felix Augustin explained in an email to CNN. “An exception were the pterosaurs, some of which reached gigantic body sizes — the reason for this is probably that they could fly and thus were not as severely impacted by the limited resources on the island.”
The other, more unusual, distinguishing feature of this species was the shape of their heads. As pictured, Transylvanosaurus platycephalus had remarkably wide and flat heads, making them different from all previously reported reptiles in the Rhabdodontidae family — a group that lived about 70 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period.
The researchers involved in this study said the newly discovered species lived on the island alongside other dwarf dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles and pterosaurs. They also said that their findings helped to disprove a widespread assumption that Europe had a low diversity of dinosaurs roaming the landscape during the late Cretaceous period.
Palaeontologists find and study fossils all over the world, in almost every environment. The fossilized remains of a new species of pterosaur dubbed the “Dragon of Death” were found in the Andes Mountains, while the gallery above contains images of a specially preserved “dueling dinosaurs” specimen that originated from the wild terrains of Montana.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.
