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Saveliev et al. 2012: BRAIN ANATOMY OF AMUROSAURUS RIABININI

Great photographs of artificial endocasts taken from several specimens of Amurosaurus. It is a pretty cool paper for the descriptions and figures but the conclusions.....

Saveliev et al. argue that hadrosaurids could not have used crests for visual communication because of their small visual lobes, unlike other sauropsids who are visually communicative, incl. lizards and birds. Instead, they argue based that the extensive nasal chambers in lambeosaurine dinosaurs are for improving vomeronasal sensing. Not sure how this would work though for non-crested and solid crested hadrosaurids. They also reject the idea that hadrosaurid were capable of perceiving greater sound ranges.. this seems to fly in the face of arguments by several other papers of late...

Saveliev don't agree with Evans et al. (2009) regarding their interpretation of the olfactory lobes of lambeosaurines... it will be interesting to see if Evans et al. reply to this.

There is also some weird statements regarding hadrosaurids having "to search for food in the water or semiliquid medium" (p. 89).

Citation and link to the paper below the jump...

Saveliev SV, Alifanov VR and Bolotsky YL (2012). Brain anatomy of Amurosaurus riabinini and some neurobiological pecularities of duck-billed dinosaurs. Paleontological Journal, 46(1): 79-91.

Abstract: Twenty-two endocasts of 12 specimens of Amurosaurus riabinini Bolotsky et Kurzanov (Lambeosaurinae, Hadrosauridae) have been examined. The most important neurobiological features of this species and duck-billed dinosaurs integrally are discussed. It has been established that the sense of smell played the major role in afferentation of hadrosaurids. In lambeosaurines, the vomeronasal sense of smell was probably intensified to search for sexual partners at a large distance. The hypotheses of sound and visual communications of duck-billed dinosaurs are not corroborated.

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