Earth Sciences 2266F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Sauropoda, Tetanurae, Scapula
26 Jul 2016
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Document Summary
Just the lone scapula bone is much bigger than the human. Very hard to collect whole animal in fossils since they"re so big. Teeth were never specialized; teeth were simple (spear-head like teeth) Front part of jaws used mostly for scraping leaves. Ornithiscian arthosaurs had chopping/grinding teeth but sauropods didn"t evolve this. Sauropod teeth is equivalent to the horse front incisors, and rely on stomach to do digestion. Despite some of the big animals, jaw structure was simple; relatively small muscles and very thin, lying at the back of the mouth. Some dinosaur had a duck bill-like, straight upper jaw. At this time, mostly ferns and not grass so they used this jaw structure. If we put all the vertebral column pieces together, they cannot raise their head above their shoulder so they"re mostly looking at the ground, so they use their jaw structure as a mechanism to feed on things below.
