Nick Longrich - The first duckbill dinosaur from Africa - palaeontology research talk

Nick Longrich
University of Bath
https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/...

There's a writeup of this research here: https://www.nicklongrich.com/blog/ajn...

This research seminar is part of the University of Portsmouth, School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences Research seminar series.
https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/struc...

The first duckbill dinosaur from Africa

By the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, distinct dinosaurs evolved in the northern and southern continents. The breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea during the Jurassic isolated the world’s dinosaurs, leading evolution in different directions in different parts of the world. Duckbills, horned dinosaurs, and tyrannosaurs dominated in the North. Long-necked titanosaurs and carnivorous abelisaurs dominated in the south. Now, a duckbill dinosaur has been found in Africa. How did a lineage from North America end up across the world, in Africa? Remarkably, dinosaurs seem to have been able to cross oceans- swimming, floating, or rafting hundreds of kilometers of across seas. Oceanic dispersal seems to play a much larger role than previously appreciated- explaining the distribution of not just duckbills, but also titanosaurs, spinosaurs, and other Cretaceous groups. In the Cenozoic, rafting and swimming explain the distribution of elephants, marsupials, horses, rodents, and primates- including our own ancestors. Rare, low-probability events have repeatedly played a key role in the evolution of dinosaurs, and other animals, showing the role of chance in evolution. Events like rafting and mass extinction are rare, once-in-a-million-year events, but over hundreds of millions of years, these rare events happen over and over.