A Virginia Tech student just made a discovery that’s giving scientists something to roar about. On the surface, it might look like just a lumpy, pockmarked fossil, but for senior geosciences major Simba Srivastava, it’s a window into a meat-eating dinosaur that’s three times older than T. rex.
“This is a uniquely sucky specimen,” said Srivastava. “It’s so bad. Like, if you saw a human skull in this way, you’d throw up.”
Recommended Videos
It’s the kind of breakthrough you’d expect from a seasoned curator or a tenured professor. But when geobiologists Sterling Nesbitt and Michelle Stocker first met Srivastava during his freshman year, they knew he was the one for the job.
“We want undergraduate researchers to experience the whole paleontological research process at Virginia Tech,” said Nesbitt. “Simba grabbed the project by the reins.”
Srivastava’s dedication paid off. On Wednesday, his findings were published in Papers in Palaeontology, shining new light on how dinosaurs took over the Jurassic period.
The fossil’s journey started when it was first unearthed in 1982 at New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch by a Carnegie Museum of Natural History crew. Decades later, Nesbitt rediscovered it tucked away in a drawer and eventually brought it to Blacksburg, where Srivastava got to work.
Ultimately, Srivastava discovered that the skull belonged to a meat-eating dinosaur from the end of the Triassic period, about 252 million to 201 million years ago. It’s the only one of its kind anyone’s ever found.
After two years of deep research, the Virginia Tech team was able to determine that the skull belonged to one of the last surviving members of one of the earliest-evolving families of carnivorous dinosaurs called Herrerasauria.
The fossil revealed several features, including massive cheekbones, a wide braincase, and a short, deep snout, traits never before seen in early dinosaurs. According to the study, it’s proof that these prehistoric predators were constantly evolving.
“This specimen, it fits in my hands, but it is the only proof that any of these dinosaurs lived this long, lived in these latitudes, the only proof that they evolved to have this skull shape,” Srivastava said. “All these billions of individuals that existed through time are spoken for by this one specimen.”