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Ancient wildebeest-like Rusingoryx had bizarre nose similar to dinosaurs

An ancient herbivore related to the wildebeest had a bizarre nose like a dinosaur that lived tens of millions of years earlier, researchers have found.

Key Points for Rusingoryx

Key points:

  • Rusingoryx atopocranion had large sinuses and a trumpet-like nasal passage
  • Nose feature previously only seen in hadrosaur dinosaurs, which lived tens of millions of years earlier
  • Rusingoryx and hadrosaur nose designs may have evolved to allow development of big plant-munching teeth
  • Both species show similar evolutionary steps

The fierce-looking Rusingoryx atopocranion, which roamed the savannas of Africa between 55,000 and 75,000 years ago, had large sinuses and a trumpet-like nasal passage, a report published in the journal Current Biology today said.

These bizarre features have previously only been seen in hadrosaur dinosaurs — the so-called "cows of the Cretaceous".

"This is a new morphology for mammals," palaeontologist PhD candidate Haley O'Brien of Ohio University, first author on the study, said.

The researchers said Rusingoryx and the unrelated hadrosaurs developed their nose design through similar evolutionary steps.

It could have been a result of the skull being re-organised to allow the animals to develop teeth that were specialised for eating plants, they said.

We had originally thought that inside Rusingoryx's skull it would look a lot more like other mammals.

Haley O'Brien

To date, the only fossil evidence of Rusingoryx has been in the form of teeth and horns that told scientists the animal was closely related to wildebeest and had "tall teeth", Ms O'Brien said.

"It was able to grind away for hours on grass without wearing out its teeth," she said.

But scientists knew little else about Rusingoryx.

"We had no idea about what it really looked like," Ms O'Brien said.

CT scans reveal hollow space

Ms O'Brien and colleagues used CT scans to analyse six recently excavated Rusingoryx skulls from Rusinga Island in Kenya to give a better picture of the beast.

"We discovered something pretty surprising," Ms O'Brien said.


"But instead what we found was a mostly hollow space."

Below the crest on its head it had a long, curved, trumpet-like nasal passage surrounding large sinuses.

Noses on different animals evolved in similar way

Ms O'Brien and her colleagues investigated how two unrelated animals separated by millions of years had similar features.

Previous research had found hadrosaurs had to go through 18 different evolutionary changes to develop their weird noses.

Ms O'Brien found in their study that 11 out of these 18 changes also occurred in Rusingoryx.

She said it was likely that Rusingoryx reorganised its skull bones to accommodate its big teeth.

At the same time, Ms O'Brien said, these developments could have helped Rusingoryx to communicate with each other across the Savannah without being heard by predators.

Acoustic models suggest vocalisations produced by the trumpet-like nasal passages could have approached the infrasound range, she said.

Ms O'Brien said while herbivores like Rusingoryx may not be as "glamorous and cool" as predators like T rex, they left a much better fossil record.

"They wind up getting stuck in a lot of situations that are conducive to fossilising like drowning in rivers or lakes," Ms O'Brien said.

The Rusinga Island Rusingoryx were found in a river channel deposit and the most likely explanation for this is that they died in a mass drowning, she said.

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