Tuesday, 13 May 2025

Reinaut Formation: Altospathadens

The Reinaut Formation in the south of the continent called Guralta is one of, if not the most extensive fossil site from the late Bobossic. Dated to have been formed between 125 and 122 million Eryobian years ago, the Reinaut Formation offers a glimpse of what life was like in the Kikilian, the latest stage of the Bobossic right before the devastating mass extinction dubbed “The World Scarring” happened.
Back when it was formed, the Reinaut Formation was likely a subtropical or temperate open woodland subject to seasonal rains. The fossils discovered in the Reinaut Formation so far, have mostly been megafaunal animals which tended to fossilise better than smaller animals in the conditions that were present in Reinaut 122 million years ago.

One of the largest and definitely the tallest animals were strange Arachnopods of the genus Altospathadens. This genus is known from several other late Bobossic fossil sites around the world and the material found in Reinaut belongs to the largest of them all: Altospathadens ingens. While the material of A. Ingens is quite fragmentary as all we have is a partial skull, few dorsal scutes and a lower leg bone, thanks to the Altospathadens fossils from other sites, we have a fairly good understanding of how this animal would have looked. By comparing the Reinaut material to other Altospathadens fossils, it was determined that A. Ingens would have been a gigantic animal, an Arachnopod so big that only the very largest modern Ararchnotheres can outweigh it.
The wear on its teeth and beak show that soft vegetation composed the majority of its diet. Altospathadens would have likely either been a high browsing herbivore or a wading herbivore feeding on aquatic plant or, most likely, some combination of both. It had two large horns on its head that were probably used for both intraspecific combat and defence. On its back was a row of large osteoderms that formed a thick shield. These scutes seem to have been better developed in A. Ingens than in other Altospathadens species, which might be an adaptation to coexisting with very large carnivores such as Onchometopos and Palaeophialtes.

 

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