Supplementary material for: Testing for a dietary shift in the Early Cretaceous ceratopsian dinosaur Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis

DOI10.5281/zenodo.4527748Zenodo4527748MaRDI QIDQ6704002FDOQ6704002

Dataset published at Zenodo repository.

Mike Benton, Qi Zhao, Emily J. Rayfield, Damiano Landi, Logan King

Publication date: 9 February 2021

Description

Many dinosaurs may have shown ecological differentiation between hatchlings and adults, possibly because of the great size differential. The basal ceratopsian Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis is known from thousands of specimens from the Early Cretaceous of China and these include many so-called 'juvenile clusters'. During the early stages of ontogeny, P. lujiatunensis underwent a posture shift from quadrupedal to bipedal, and a dietary shift has also been postulated. In this study, we apply a 2D mechanical analysis of the jaws of a hatchling and an adult to determine the differences between the two systems and found some differences, but only modest. The adult was better suited to feeding on tough plant material than the hatchling, based on its higher values of absolute and relative bite forces and higher values of mechanical advantage, but there were no substantial shifts in jaw shape or function.

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