Excited to share our new paper on the sauropodomorph Anchisaurus, its cranial ontogeny, and developmental innovation among long-necked dinosaurs! Huge thanks to my coauthors @GNavalon @phyloprog and @AnjanBhullar for making this project so great! Thread https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.14190

We CT scanned the skulls of the juvenile and adult individuals referred to the early sauropodomorph Anchisaurus. While the adult shows traits in common to sauropods, the juvenile resembles early saurischians, suggesting that development had a role in shaping the head of sauropods

Morphometrics applied to ontogenetic series of sauropodomorphs, theropods and other archosaurs show that the sauropod skull is not the result of pedomorphosis, but predisplacement: features present in adult early sauropodomorphs are found in the embryos of sauropods

Taken altogether, we show that the peculiar skull morphology of sauropodomorphs was not originated through means of heterochrony and that a diversity of developmental innovations is responsible for the skull disparity among dinosaur clades. Hope you will enjoy our paper!