Saturday, March 21, 2009

The Evolution of the Lepidosaurian Lower Temporal Bar

The evolution of the lepidosaurian lower temporal bar: new perspectives from the Late Cretaceous of South China. 2009. Jin-You Mo, et al. J. Exp. Biol. Published online before print March 18, 2009.

Abstract: Until recently, it was considered axiomatic that the skull of lizards and snakes arose from that of a diapsid ancestor by loss of the lower temporal bar. The presence of the bar in the living New Zealand Tuatara, Sphenodon, was thus considered primitive, corroborating its status as a ‘living fossil’.

A combination of new fossils and rigorous phylogeny has demonstrated unequivocally that the absence of the bar is the primitive lepidosaurian condition, prompting questions as to its function.


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Here we describe new material of Tianyusaurus, a remarkable lizard from the Late Cretaceous of China that is paradoxical in having a complete lower temporal bar and a fixed quadrate. New material from Jiangxi Province is more complete and less distorted than the original holotype.

Tianyusaurus is shown to be a member of the Boreoteiioidea, a successful clade of large herbivorous lizards that were dispersed through eastern Asia, Europe and North America in the Late Cretaceous, but disappeared in the end-Cretaceous extinction. A unique combination of characters suggests that Tianyusaurus took food items requiring a large gape.