SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, June 27 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The magazine ‘Science Advances’ has published an article that gives an account of the paleontological investigation in which remains of a new species of hadrosauroid dinosaur have been discovered in Chile. Researchers from Chilean, Brazilian, Argentine and German universities have participated in the work, as well as the University of La Laguna itself through the paleontologist from the Department of Animal Biology, Pedology and Geology Penélope Cruzado Caballero.
Hadrosaurid dinosaurs, also known as ‘duckbills’ or ‘Cretaceous cows’, were a highly diverse group of herbivorous dinosaurs that lived during the Cretaceous period, approximately 85 to 65 million years ago. Its remains can be found mainly throughout the northern hemisphere and, to a lesser extent, in the southern hemisphere, where they are concentrated in South America (until now only in Argentina), Africa and Antarctica.
The new species found in this research comes from the extreme south of Chile, lived about 72 million years ago and has been named Gonkoken nanoi. The excavation where it was found began in 2013 in the valley of the Río de las Chinas in the Magallanes Region of sub-Antarctic Chile, in the extreme south of southern Patagonia.
Gonkoken is not just another species in a long list of hadrosaurid species, since the discovery and subsequent study of its remains has brought surprising discoveries. Thus, this species retains primitive characters along with some other more derived characters, and the analysis of all of them revealed a relationship with North American species that lived several million before and were already extinct at the time that Gonkoken walked through Chilean lands.
This raised many questions for the research team, since the only species described for South America, all of them from Argentina, are derived hadrosaurids, while Gonkoken is the first member of a possible more primitive clade and different from the one that brought the rest of the species to American territories. . The clade is the biological denomination of any grouping that includes the common ancestor and all its descendants, living or extinct.
Another of the curious things about Gonkoken is its small size, since it is estimated that it would measure between 3.5 and 4 meters. This is reminiscent of the case of Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus, a basal European hadrosauroid from the late Cretaceous that shares with Gonkoken the fact of being a relict species (in retrogression) that survived displacement and replacement by more derived species (the hadrosaurids), and possessing a reduced body size. In the case of Telmatosaurus, its size and relic character are explained by living isolated on an island, an explanation that may also be plausible for Gonkoken.
