How to age your dinosaur? Or why a small hole in your fossil is good for science.
The sauropods were the largest animals to ever walk the earth. This imposes some physical and biological problems on their bodies. How did they grow so large? And how long did it take? With a brief introduction into bone histological methods, it will be an easy task to understand the success of these behemoths. Microscopic study of the mineralized tissues of long bones, ribs and other skeletal elements shows how their structural organization was adapted to the enormous stresses imposed by enormous weights. Bone is remarkably malleable, and can be produced at very rapid rates, when woven in porous scaffoldings. Filling up the scaffolding as the animal matures, provides mechanical stability, and permits a large size at a young age. This feature was already present in dinosaur ancestors, but the sauropods really drove it to the maximum, with adaptations in vascular orientation similar to those seen in large mammals such as elephants. In some skeletal elements such as ribs, we can also find growth marks, thought to represent annual growth interruptions. These can of course help us to estimate more precisely the age at time of death, and open up a new perspective to our understanding of sauropod life histories.
Biography Dr. Koen Stein
Koen Stein is a palaeontologist, specialised in the palaeobiology of dinosaurs and other vertebrates. To understand the biology and evolution of these animals, careful study of their fossil remains is required. Koen has been studying bone, tooth and eggshell tissues of fossil and extant tetrapods since 2007. During his PhD at the University of Bonn (Germany), he studied the effects of gigantism on the structure of sauropodomorph bone tissues. Since then, he developed histomorphometry and comparative histological methods to characterise and compare different mineralised tissues of various tetrapods, including dinosaurs and other reptiles, but also mammals and amphibians. In recent years as researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences he has also applied geochemical methods to better understand the preservation of fossilized tissues, and how it may affect the interpretation of biological features.