#mirasaura

IT’S CALLED 👉👉 MIRASAURA 👈👈 AND IT REPRESENTS A THIRD TIME COMPLEX INTEGUMENT EVOLVED??? AND MAYBE THOSE CREST THINGS WERE COMMON IN DREPANOSAURS?

Its finally out! Please Welcome Mirasaura! A new drepanosaur from the Middle Triassic of France. Gabriel Ugueto made the press artwork but I couldn't hold back and had to do my own interpretation during break time =)

This tiny guy not only shows strucutres that are basically the same as in Longisquama, it shows that Longissquama was likewise a drepanosaur and that reptiles experimented with beta keratin structures way earlier than we thought so far.

Learn more about it here:

Back in 1939, fossil collector Louis Grauvogel discovered a couple of reptile fossils in Middle Triassic-aged deposits (~247 million years old) in eastern France. A large preserved structure was noted above the animal's back, but for many years it was interpreted as an unrelated fish fin, insect wing, or plant frond.

It was only when the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart acquired the specimens in 2019 that they were recognized as representing something very special: a long-sought-after relative of the bizarre and enigmatic Longisquama!

Mirasaura grauvogeli grew to around 30cm long (~1') and was, if anything, even stranger than its relative. It had humped shoulders, grasping limbs, and a bird-like head with large forward-facing eyes and a long pointed snout that was toothless at the front, probably used to probe for small invertebrates in cracks and crevices.

But most strikingly it had up to 20 tall structures overlapping along its back to form a sail-like crest. Although they were superficially feather-like in shape with preserved melanosomes that resemble those of birds, structurally they weren't feathers at all – but they also weren't modified scales. Instead these appear to have been an entirely novel type of skin appendage, made up of continuous sheets with a midline shaft and a corrugated texture.

The crest was probably used for visual display, and 80 additional fossils of isolated crest structures suggest they were regularly shed and regrown.

Along with Longisquama, Mirasaura appears to have been an early member of the drepanosaur lineage – a group of wonderfully weird tamandua-like reptiles whose evolutionary relationships are still disputed, with different studies currently recovering them as either a unique early offshoot of the diapsids or as archosauromorphs.

(Interestingly, a specimen of Drepanosaurus reportedly preserves some soft tissue on its back that may also be one of these strange new crest structures. Drepanosaurs just keep on getting weirder and weirder and I love them.)

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Breaking news! A newly-described European relative of the bizarre early Triassic reptile Longisquama just dropped:

here's this week's #Paleostream flocking drawings!!!

this week we drew Palaeocampa, Nektognathus, Wudingloong, and Mirasaura

mirasaura grauvogeli