2023/05/18 by Romain Pintore, Raphaël Cornette, Alexandra Houssaye +1 · 1 voice
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Mathematics · #Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology #Evolution and Paleontology Studies #Morphological variations and asymmetry
paper · doi:10.7554/elife.83413
openalex publication_date 2023/05/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Sexual dimorphism is challenging to detect among fossils due to a lack of statistical representativeness. The Angeac-Charente Lagerstätte (France) represents a remarkable 'snapshot' from a Berriasian (Early Cretaceous) ecosystem and offers a unique opportunity to study intraspecific variation among a herd of at least 61 coeval ornithomimosaurs. Herein, we investigated the hindlimb variation across the best-preserved specimens from the herd through 3D Geometric Morphometrics and Gaussian Mixture Modeling. Our results based on complete and fragmented femora evidenced a dimorphism characterized by variations in the shaft curvature and the distal epiphysis width. Since the same features vary between sexes among modern avian dinosaurs, crocodilians, and more distant amniotes, we attributed this bimodal variation to sexual dimorphism based on the extant phylogenetic bracketing approach. Documenting sexual dimorphism in fossil dinosaurs allows a better characterization and accounting of intraspecific variations, which is particularly relevant to address ongoing taxonomical and ecological questions relative to dinosaur evolution.