“Armored dinosaurs breathed through ‘Krazy Straws,'” LiveScience reporter Stephanie Pappas writes about a presentation by Ohio University Biological Sciences doctoral student Jason Bourke.
The dinosaurs lacked respiratory turbinates, structures in the nasal cavity that warm and humidify the air coming in, and had to find a new way to do this.
Carrying around an exoskeleton of bony armor is hard work. But armored ankylosaurs figured out a way to shoulder the load and stay cool. These Cretaceous dinosaurs had “Krazy Straw” nasal passages that helped them air-condition their brains, according to a new study.
“These heads are just covered with bone — they just look like rocks with eyes. And yet, when you look inside, they have these noses that go all over the place,” said Jason Bourke, a doctoral student at Ohio University who is presenting his findings on ankylosaurus noses on Nov. 8 at the annual meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology in Berlin.
Bourke and his colleagues were intrigued by the “roller-coaster” paths taken by the nasal passages of tanklike ankylosaurs, which become well-preserved fossils because they are so bizarrely bony. The convoluted airways are flanked by small tunnels where blood vessels would have run, suggesting that the setup may have had to do with heat exchange, Bourke told Live Science.
Ankylosaurs and other large dinosaurs had small brains, which were at risk of overheating easily, Bourke said. If cool air from the nose could cool the blood in the head, it might help prevent the brain from sweltering, he added.
Read the rest of Pappas’ story on Bourke at Mother Nature Network.
Bourke is the lead author of the new study, “Breathing Life Into Dinosaurs: Tackling Challenges of Soft-Tissue Restoration and Nasal Airflow in Extinct Species,” published Oct. 14 in the Anatomical Record.
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