Killing-off Scottish Mammaliamorphs

With all that’s been going on in the last couple of months (including attending #2017SVP, Friends of  Hugh Miller’s conference, and #SVPCA2017), I’ve dropped the ball on this blog a little. But this week past, I had a new paper out with my colleagues, and I’d like to tell you a little more of the story behind it.

When I started my PhD on the fossil material of the Isle of Skye, one thing really surprised me. There is this whole group of cynodonts (the group that includes mammals and their nearest relatives) that no one ever talks about. They are called tritylodontids (Tritylodontidae), and despite being one of the most successful clades of cynodont – lasting from the Late Triassic to the Early Cretaceous - they are often overlooked by palaeontologists. We find one of them, called Stereognathus, on the Isle of Skye.

Perhaps the best piece of tritylodontid palaeoart, Stereognathus by Mark Witton - find out about him and support his amazing work.

Why should we care about these extinct animals? Well, they’re considered by most to be the sister-group to stem-mammals, and share many similarities in their skeleton. They would have had fur and whiskers, and you might mistake one for a mammal if you didn’t look too closely. But there are some interesting differences. Tritylodontids kept the so-called “reptilian” jaw joint, between the articular and quadrate bones (not the dentary squamosal contact as in mammals). They also didn’t go through the same extreme reduction in body size we see in the first mammals. In fact some tritylodontids were pretty big, like Kayentatherium from the Early Jurassic, which was about a metre long. Unlike the earliest mammals, tritylodontids appear to have been almost exclusively herbivorous. 

All in all, they were occupying quite a unique ecological space in the Mesozoic. 

The first tritylodontid to be described was the Middle Jurassic genus, Stereognathus, named by Charlesworth in 1855 and figured by Richard Owen shortly after. Unfortunately though, this genus is represented by only a few molar teeth in a fragment of jaw, a bunch of isolated teeth, and some individual bits of limb that might belong to Stereognathus, but it’s uncertain. Most of this material came from sites in Oxfordshire, England.

Owen's original figures from 1857, scanned courtesy of BHL

Charlesworth called this first Stereognathus species, S. ooliticus, after the rocks they were found in, the Great Oolite Group. More than 100 years later, Robert Savage and Michael Waldman found teeth they identified as belonging to Stereognathus on the Isle of Skye. They named it S.hebridicus, after the Inner Hebrides islands, to which Skye belongs. Unfortunately, their only diagnostic feature was that S. hebridicus was bigger than S. ooliticus. More recently, field work has recovered more S. hebridicus teeth. I decided to set out with my co-authors to test this size difference, and see if we could find other details of the shape of the teeth that would support S. hebridicus as a separate, Scottish species.

A photo of the most intact Stereognathus specimen, found and photographed by Andrzej Wolniewicz during fieldwork on the Isle of Skye.

We microCT scanned all the new material, and the two holotypes of S. ooliticus and S. hebridicus. We measured every tooth of Stereognathus we could, many being too broken up or worn to give reliable measurements. Even the original S. ooliticus specimen figured by Owen was in a poor state: comparing it to his original drawings, it seems over 150 years of handling hasn’t been kind. 

We didn’t find any good evidence that S. hebridicus is a separate species from S. ooliticus. Although the holotypes are radically different in size, when you take all of the rest of the teeth we have and plot them (below), they fall along a line of size change you’d see from baby to adult. In other words, size differences are explained by ontogeny: development from earliest stage of life to maturity.

All of the measureable upper postcanines of Stereognathus. Empty diamonds and squares indicate less certain measurements (due to breakage or wear). I expect field work over the coming years will fill this out to show a full growth series of size.

To my horror, I’ve sunk the only Scottish tritylodontid! Unless new fossils tell us differently, it looks like S. hebridicus is no more. This makes it a junior synonym to S. ooliticus. It’s a shame to see our Scottish species go, but I’m glad that it was the new, more physically intact fossil material from Skye that allowed us to make a proper reassessment of the genus. 

Who knows, perhaps there is still another species of tritylodontid to be found on the rocky shores of the misty Isle? I'll keep looking and get back to you...

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Panciroli E, Walsh S, Fraser NC, Brusatte SL, and Corfe I. 2017. A reassessment of the postcanine dentition and systematics of the tritylodontid Stereognathus (Cynodontia, Triltylodontidae, Mammaliamorpha) from the Middle Jurassic of the United Kingdom. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Waldman M, and Savage RJG. 1972. The first Jurassic mammal from Scotland. Journal of the Geological Society of London.

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