The buttheads have foiled the experts again. A dragonlike dinosaur skull unearthed in South Dakota last year may force paleontologists to rewrite the history of a dinosaur group beloved to children – the buttheads, more technically known as pachycephalosaurs.
Boulder dinosaur-digger Bob Bakker has confirmed that the dinosaur, found by three amateurs, is a new species in a rare family with a handful of known North American relatives.
“I saw this head and had two thoughts,” he said. “One, I’m completely wrong about everything I knew about buttheads, and two, that’s really nifty. … This animal shouldn’t exist.”
Mark Goodwin, a “pachy” family expert at the University of California, Berkeley, was less enthusiastic. “There’s a lot of variation in the skull in this group,” said Goodwin, viewing a photo of the new specimen.
Buttheads are so nicknamed, he said, because according to lore, they rammed, butted and pushed each other around with the armored tops of their heads.
But last year, Goodwin and a colleague published research showing that the dinosaurs’ bone structure was such that a heavy blow to the head could have been fatal, and that helmet heads began disintegrating by adulthood.
Buttheads might have used their odd craniums for display, perhaps advertising their gender or species, Goodwin said.
Bakker said he’s particularly surprised that the new skull has no dome, a characteristic of many other members of its family. But it does have an unusually long muzzle and spikes, and that’s odd, because evolutionary experts believed the family acquired domes before spikes.
It could take years and more fossils to reconfigure the evolutionary history of the buttheads, he said, but he’s fascinated by some possible implications.
“It could be that very, very late in the age of dinosaurs, this incredible little explosion of species diversity happened,” Bakker suggested.
Goodwin called such speculation premature. “It’s certainly worth scouring the beds where this was found to find more … but changing the scientific view of evolution near the end of the age of dinosaurs? That’s a little hyperbole.”
The new butthead will be displayed at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
