Pulaosaurus qinglong

We're admittedly getting to Pulaosaurus qinglong a bit after announcement and description, but what's a few weeks after 160 million years? "Hypsil"-type dinosaurs are always going to be welcome here, and this one also has potential gut contents, albeit left for a later date, so let's extend a welcome and have a look after the jump break.

Feeding Diamantinasaurus

It's no secret that we like titanosaurs here at Equatorial Minnesota, and another favorite topic is potential gut contents in herbivorous dinosaurs (albeit we don't see a lot of papers on it). When Poropat et al. (2025)'s paper on the potential gut contents of a specimen of Diamantinasaurus matildae came out a couple of weeks ago, it was an obvious paper to cover here. True, diamantinasaurus may not be titanosaurs by phylogeny, but they're close, and they're still titanosaurs in our hearts.

The gut contents of Borealopelta

Seems like we just had Borealopelta markmitchelli as a major part of a post. Unlike back in March, this time around the famously well-preserved nodosaur doesn't have to share space with any other ankylosaurs. The occasion is the publication of Brown et al. (2020), which describes plant material found inside the carcass of the ankylosaur. This publication is freely available, and if you have any interest in dinosaur paleobiology you ought to snag it (and its supplementary material; never forget the supplements!).

Borealopelta

At last, the "Suncor ankylosaur" takes its place among the described! With the description of Borealopelta, I can cross off one more from "Coming Attractions". (That's four and a half down, with half-credit on Daspletosaurus, and eighteen and a half to go.) The first thing I recommend that you do is to download the description and the supplemental information from here.

Borealopelta, photo borrowed from Wikimedia Commons.

Isaberrysaura, and the further revenge of gut contents

This week saw the publication of two new dinosaurs. Both of them have something to recommend them, but given my own preoccupations we'll have to leave Xingxiulong for someone else, or for another time. (Feel free to hop over to the paper, though!) Instead, we shall meet Isaberrysaura mollensis, a basal ornithischian packing an identity crisis and a belly full of seeds.

Regarding Liaoningosaurus

By now you may have heard about the new paper by Ji Q. et al. on Liaoningosaurus, proposing some surprising things about the paleobiology of this ankylosaur. Andrea Cau already had a go at it over at Theropoda. I'm afraid I won't be as concise or insightful, but possible gut contents are involved, and having fought my own gut-content dinosaur to a truce, I think I can bring a distinct perspective to this paper. 

A locked dinosaur mystery

So, one of the things you're supposed to do if you have a blog is to talk about your research when a paper you authored comes out. Okay, give me a minute. I mentioned back in the gut contents post that I did my thesis on what was found in the inside of a brachylophosaur. The first part, on the gut contents themselves, was published back in 2008 (Tweet et al. 2008). Finally, after about a decade of gnawing on the manuscript, comes the other part (Tweet et al. 2016).

Reports of gut contents in herbivorous dinosaurs

I generally avoid writing "nuts and bolts" posts about dinosaurs, because there's a lot of people already doing that who know what they're doing. There is, however, one topic on which I'm uniquely qualified to pontificate. In a previous lifetime I was a fresh-faced graduate student who wrote his thesis on possible gut contents in the "Leonardo" specimen of Brachylophosaurus. As such, I spent a fair amount of time considering the history of possible gut contents in herbivorous dinosaurs, which consists of an exclusive club populated by four hadrosaurs, one ankylosaur, and one sauropod. In retrospect, the Leonardo project was somewhat beyond my powers, but I battled on against overwhelming oddities and came out of it eventually. (For you folks playing along at home, by "herbivorous dinosaurs" I mean more or less classic dinosaurs that aren't theropods. I've got nothing against birds, which include many a herbivorous dinosaur, but they aren't why I got interested in these things, and I don't feel sentimental about them being dinosaurs, because "my" dinosaurs are almost all ornithischians and have all been dead for 66 million years.)