Science Friday - A Reptile’s Baffling Backfin And The Math Of Dashing Dinos

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

Paleontologists have identified an ancient reptile with a towering crest made not of skin, or scales, or feathers, or antler—but something else entirely. It’s some kind of integumentary outerwear we’ve never seen before. The small creature sporting the curious crest was named Mirasaura grauvogeli, and it lived during the Middle Triassic period, about 247 million years ago, just before dinosaurs evolved. Host Flora Lichtman talks to evolutionary biologist Richard Prum about this dramatic dorsal mystery and what it tells us about the evolution of dinosaurs, birds, and feathers. Plus, how fast did dinosaurs run? It turns out that the equation scientists have been using for five decades to estimate dinosaur speeds is not completely accurate. To understand what this could mean for velociraptor velocities, T. rex tempos, and spinosaurus speeds, Flora talks with paleobiologist Peter Falkingham.Guests: Dr. Richard Prum is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and head curator of ornithology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He previously chaired Yale’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.Dr. Peter Falkingham is a professor of paleobiology at Liverpool John Moores University in England.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, it's Flor Lixman, and this is Science Friday. Today in the show, a weird crest on an ancient reptile has scientists scratching their heads. Paleontology often requires a kind of fantasy functional biology where you go, wow, what were these for? Brace yourself. New animal appendage just dropped. Paleontologists have identified an ancient reptile with a towering crest on its back, that is not made of skin or scales or feathers or antler, but something else entirely that we have never seen before. The small creature sporting this befuddling back fin is named the Mirasora and lived during the mid-Triassic period about 250 million years ago, just before dinosaurs evolved.

Here to discuss this novel skin gear and what it tells us about the evolution of dinosaurs, birds and feathers is Dr. Richard Prum, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and head curator of ornithology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. He's based in New Haven, Connecticut. Rick, welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. New flesh thing. That seems big. Yeah. Well, you know, in the skin world, this is a big deal. These structures are just so weird compared to anything we're familiar with among extant animals.

Well, tell me more. Why are they weird? First of all, these are the structures we're talking about are part of a group of anatomical parts that are things that grow out of the skin. These integumentary appendages include hair and feathers and scales, also antlers and horns, claw and nails, that whole group of things. So that's already really diverse. And these are really extraordinary, the fact that they're flat like a feather, but unbranched and contiguous, you know, like a sheet of tissue. And they extend off the back of this tiny little lizard-like reptile. And the longest ones are nearly the length of the body of the animal. So these would have been very weird to encounter in life and equally strange in fossils.

Do we know what their texture was like? Are they stiff? Are they soft? That's really interesting. The authors of this new paper support the idea that they are stiff, that they're solid, and if you will, kerogenize like a horn or a nail or a feather. But it's interesting, I think that we still aren't exactly sure. These structures are kind of wrinkled in their preservation. And those wrinkles seem like they could be artifacts. So they might have been softer and fleshy. But they have a central shaft with a blade of tissue extending up from the back. A central shaft with a blade of tissue. I'm having a hard time visualizing that. Actually, it looks a lot like an unbranched fern frond. And that is actually one of the things that people thought this might be early on in the history of this fossil. How do we know this is actually a completely new kind of skin organ? So one of the reasons why this is so exciting is that, you know, there is the possibility and actually previous suggestion that these kinds of

kinds of structures might be homologous with feathers, that is, early representatives of that appendage. So the way which we actually would study that is both to describe the anatomy of these materials, but also to make sure that we have the phylogeny right, that is that we've plugged these animals in the right branch on the tree of life. So one of the extraordinary things about this paper is that they've done really careful phylogenetic work. They took these beautifully preserved, but crushed, if you will, flattened fossils and did advanced tomography on them, cat scans, and then reconstructed the skull and using that information,

we're able to find out where it belongs in the tree of life. And that, of course, is important because that is really going to affect what you conclude about how these things may have evolved. And where does it fall? And what does it mean for whether it's a protofeather or not? Well, it turns out that they have identified, I think, really robustly and for the first time, that this Mirosaur is in an early diverging branch in the portion of the tree of life we call reptiles. It's outside of what we would call the crown clade, the group of reptiles that includes all the extant organisms that we know, birds and crocodiles and lizards and snakes, turtles. It's outside of that group. And that implies since it's so distant from birds that this is an

evolutionarily independent event. Hmm. Does it tell us anything about the story of skin? Yeah. Well, you know, what I think is most exciting about this research is that it's a turn away from some, you know, paleontological work in recent years. Going back 20, 25 years ago, there was very exciting developments in understanding the evolutionary origin of feathers. People have discovered other kinds of reptiles with interesting things growing on their skin. And the effort has usually been to associate them with feathers and to push back the origin of feathers into earlier and earlier lineages. And so what this work shows is that feathers aren't the only complicated thing growing out of the skin of reptiles. And they have independently evolved a really weird large blade-like structure.

And so what it teaches us is that the history of the evolution of reptile skin, indeed amniote skin, is common. complicated, right? I think it's a move toward recognizing that these things are not feathers, but have evolved in a complicated way independently of feathers. And it implies that there's something special about reptile skin that's fostered this diversity. That's fascinating. I mean, do you think that paleontologists are going to revisit fossils and wonder whether they made the wrong assumption about feathers after seeing this? Well, this is always being a tug-of-war intellectually, different people publishing different ideas. Yeah, I hope that we get a movement toward that. And one of the ways which that happens is really looking at not only the unusual structures, but all the lineages we have

between birds and these other reptiles that don't have weird appendages on the skin that are just scaling, right? So to me, I think feathers originated in Theropod dinosaurs, the lineage of bipedal, mostly meat-eating dinosaurs to which birds belong. And that the, you know, other things are really additional chapters in the complex history of reptile skin. As always, the story is more complicated than we thought. Well, you know, that's what makes this fun. And I mean, one of the fascinating things about this is that these specimens have been sitting in a collection. They were actually all collected, I think, on the same day in the 1930s, an extraordinary but small place in eastern France.

and misidentified as plants, as potential fish. And it was only recently when that private collection became part of an establishing museum that the research team realized, wow, these are really weird and deserve focused attention. You've written about the evolution of beauty. Does this fit into that story? Well, you know, these things are so unusual. And that's what paleontology often requires a kind of fantasy functional biology where you go, What were these for?

And, of course, a lot of that is pretty speculative. Obviously, if they were hard and rigid versus soft and fleshy, that could really affect what they might have been doing, right? But they're certainly, without a doubt, conspicuous. And these authors claim that they were immobile. That is, that they stuck up in this sort of above the plane of the body permanently. The study also shows that these structures were melanized, that is, that they had at least some black or red-brown pigments in them.

So we know they were colorful or colored, were they patterned, you know, spots and dots and stripes. We don't know that yet. So they could have been, I don't know, thermoregulation. They could have been useful in communication, et cetera. So it's possible that these things evolve for social, sexual display, which means that they could be, their function could be in essentially some variety of reptilian beauty. Reptillion beauty, that is the perfect place to land.

Thanks, Richard. Thank you very much, Laura. A pleasure to be here. Dr. Richard Pum, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and head curator of ornithology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Don't go away because after the break. So is there a way to figure out exactly how fast a dinosaur could run? No.

No. How new research is stomping on some old assumptions about dinosaur speed. Moving from ancient reptile aesthetics to ancient reptile athletics, how fast could dinosaurs run? It turns out the equation scientists have been using for five decades to estimate dinosaur speeds. Maybe isn't so accurate. Here to tell us what this could mean for velocirapt or velocities, T-Rex tempos, sphinosaurus speeds, You get where I'm going, is Dr. Peter Falkingham, Professor of Paleobiology at Liverpool, John Morris University in England. Peter, welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, thanks for having me. We're going to get into the details of the study in a second, but I'm going to start with the question that I think we all want to know, which is, according to these new calculations, were dinosaurs faster or slower than we previously thought. This doesn't change maximum speeds, which we get from other means. What it changes is how reliable we think the speeds are from trackways. And in that regard, most of the trackways, the animal was probably moving slower than we thought. I love that outcome. Why did you take this question up? One of the things we see in paleontology is people really trying to make it more quantitative, more computational. But one of the side effects of that is that people like to get numbers out of

equations. And this is an equation that has been around for five decades, more or less. And people like to use it. But the problem was it was becoming more and more common, that people were reporting speeds from trackways to the nearest centimeter per second. You know, they'd be saying it was moving 7.56 meters per second. So that kind of accuracy just isn't really feasible or useful. And when you say trackway, do you mean like people saw fossilized prints and they were like, Okay, based on these prints, we think the dinosaur is moving at this speed. Yeah, exactly that. So if you think about when you walk versus when you run, you take shorter strides when you walk than when you run.

And the equation is based on watching mainly mammals. There are some birds in there running and walking and measuring the stride length and relating that to the speed they're moving at. So in theory, you can look at a track way, measure the stride distance and calculate the speed. And what's wrong with the old equation? There's nothing wrong with it as such. It was never meant to be a precise tool. So McNeil Alexander is this absolute giant in the field. He wrote some amazing papers. And this is one of those things where for what he was doing, it was good enough. But you look at the original graph and there's these pretty big error bars on it.

And he himself in 2006 wrote a paper where he commented, people are using this wrong. It's not for specific values. It's for this. animal was moving very quickly, this animal was moving slowly. And in that regard, it's still right. It's just you can't say this thing was moving at 5.632 meters per second. Let's talk about your study. Explain how you used videos of guinea fowl to figure out if the calculations for small theropod dinosaur speed might be off. Right. So my whole career really is based around figuring out how dinosaur footprints are made. And so 10 years ago, a little more than that now,

we collected a whole bunch of data of guinea fowl moving over, plain, mud, sand, that kind of thing, to look at how individual footprints were made. But we have this vast data set where we've collected slow motion video of guinea fowl, small theropods, small modern pheropods, running over soft substrates, and we collected all the data of the trackways out, afterwards. So all the data was there to say, okay, how accurate is this equation? How well does it

work when we have a bird? We can watch it move and we can look at the tracks in the same way we would if we found these as fossil tracks. And what did you find? Well, we plotted them on the graph and then plotted the original Alexander's equation and a couple of variants of that on the graph. And our data were nowhere near the lines produced by the equations. So the guinea fowl, you know, They were about four times slower than the equation predicted. Really? Wow, much slower. Yeah, much slower. But maybe that's to be expected.

So as you get to slower speeds, the equation doesn't really work as well. So if you think about, I gave the example earlier, if you're walking versus if you're running, you take longer strides when you're running. You move faster by moving your legs quicker and moving them further. But if you're walking through the kind of deep mud where you're leaving substantial footprints, that equation sort of breaks apart and you start taking longer strides to get your foot out of the mud and avoid getting stuck in the mud without really increasing your speed. You know, one thing that's confusing to me about this equation in general is like, you know,

if you've been to the beach, you've seen these tiny little plovers running around, right? And they're running very fast even though they seem to have, you know, they have a very short stride lane. And then you'll see a seagull running and it's like much slower even though the stride length is longer. What am I missing? Yeah, so this is another aspect to it, is this is an equation that was sort of derived from elephants and rhinos and cheetahs and dogs and cats and people and ostrich and all mushed into one big data set. But as you've just pointed out, animals move differently. So your plover and seagull, they're going to have very different leg proportions at the thigh and at the shin. And that's going to change the stride length that comes about when they're swinging the leg in the same way, if that makes sense.

So is there a way to figure out exactly how fast a dinosaur could run? No. No. So what we can do, there's two ways to get at dinosaur speed. There's tracks, which I'm biased towards. That's my area of research. And that's kind of the ground up. That's direct evidence of motion.

It's literally left by an animal moving, right? And the other side is the bones, the skeletons, the things that we, you know, see most of in the museums. So people can use computational models, they can apply muscles to the digital replicas of the skeletons, get computers to figure out how fast it could have run. But there's problems with both. So the problems with the musculoskeletal models is you can't actually prove your right or wrong. Your computer can say it could move at this speed, but how do you justify that? Normally, I would say the way you validate that is with the tracks, do the two sources of information match. But when we're talking about maximum speeds, we have this problem that is animals don't move at their maximum speed very often. And they leave tracks at their maximum speed even less.

I know we are an edge case as humans, but if you imagine how many times you've sprinted at your maximum speed today, it's probably not many times, right? It's very rare for me. Yes. Yes, yes, me too. And you also probably haven't sprinted at your maximum speed over the kind of soft softs. substrate that would leave behind recognisable footprints. Never would I sprint on a soft substrate. So fossilised trackways, unless we have a really freak occurrence,

are really unlikely to preserve the maximum speed of any animal, really. I would say the best way to approach that is to use the computational models not to look for the maximum speed, but to look for maybe the most efficient speed or the speed that involves the least metabolic cost and then do the trackways line up with that kind of thing as a sort of validation for our models. The mall walking speed for dinosaurs. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure just how you'd put it.

One more question. Why are we so obsessed with how fast animals can run anyway? Why do we care about this question, do you think? That's a great question. I don't know, but we do, don't we? In the same way that we care about which dinosaur was the biggest and which one was the But there is a genuine scientific reason for it, and that is when you find the extremes of what animals can do, that can tell you something about what's possible and how the systems work. And that's one of the reasons dinosaurs are important is because they expand so far beyond the animals alive today.

Our sauropods were so much bigger than elephants, and T-Rex was an eight-ton biped. We have nothing like that. We have no eight-ton two-legged animals today. And so by looking at these animals, that tells us what's possible. This is delightful. Thank you, Peter. My pleasure. Dr. Peter Falkingham, Professor of Paleobiology at Liverpool John Moore's University in England. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review us wherever you listen, but only if you like the show. It really does help us get the word out and get the show in front of new listeners. Today's episode was produced by Shoshana Bucksbaum.

I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.