Round One: Abditosaurus vs Ibirania
Factfiles:
Abditosaurus kuehnei
Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Walter Kühne’s forgotten reptile
Time: 70.5 million years ago (Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous)
Location: Tremp Formation, Catalonia, Spain
For a species only fully described in 2022, Abditosaurus as a fossil has a long history, stretching back to its discovery by Walter Kühne in 1954. Kühne began his palaeontological career as a political refugee from Germany after he was imprisoned by the Nazis as a communist sympathiser then forced to migrate to Britain in 1938. There he hunted for tiny Triassic mammal teeth, and in his later career he would find the fossil site where Abditosaurus was buried.
After collection expeditions in 1954 and 1955, the site was abandoned when funding for the dig was lost. The rest of the skeleton was assembled together piecemeal over the next six decades, with other researchers returning to the site in 1956, 1984, 1986, and 2012-2014! Finally, after decades of languishing in storerooms and being misassigned to other genera, Abditosaurus is back together as the most complete titanosaur ever found in Europe!
Ibirania parva
Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Little wanderer of Ibirá (a municipality of São Paulo, Brazil)
Time: ~85 to 72 million years ago (Santonian to Campanian stages of the Late Cretaceous)
Location: São José do Rio Preto Formation, Brazil
Enormous sauropods keep making the news as the next giant behemoth, stacking up a roster of incredibly huge animals that push the limits of how big a land animal can get. But every now and then, a sauropod comes along that is just a certified Little Guy, and that is Ibirania! Described in 2022 as a new genus of saltasaurine, Ibirania is remarkably little even within this modest-sized clade. It clocks in at under 6 metres long and only a couple heads taller than the average human, which also makes it an extremely temptingly rideable size. Like that’s just a less messed up horse with some slightly more uncomfortable armour plates!
Another unique feature of Ibirania is the evidence for acute osteomyelitis in the leg of one specimen, an example of one of the many diseases that could and did affect dinosaurs throughout their probably pretty difficult lives. Not only that, but there are preserved blood parasites inside the leg bone that would have caused the infection, a definite first in dinosaur paleontology! Kinda sucks for the dinosaur, but also fascinating stuff!
