Bunostegos
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Bunostegos Temporal range: Wuchiapingian, 260 Ma |
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| Reconstruction | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Order: | Procolophonomorpha |
| Family: | †Pareiasauridae |
| Genus: |
†Bunostegos Sidor et al., 2003 |
| Type species | |
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†Bunostegos akokanensis Sidor et al., 2003 |
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Bunostegos ("knobbly [skull] roof") is an extinct genus of pareiasaur parareptile from the Late Permian of the Agadez Region in Niger. The type species, Bunostegos akokanensis, was named from the Moradi Formation in 2003. It was a cow-sized animal with a distinctive skull that had large bony knobs, similar in form to those of other pareiasaurs but far larger. The species appears to have lived in a desert in the centre of the supercontinent of Pangaea.
Analysis of the limb bones (including the scapulocoracoid, humerus, radius, ulna, pelvis, and femur) was published in 2015, and revealed that Bunostegos walked upright on four limbs, with the body held above ground. This new information directly suggests that it could be the first tetrapod with a fully erect gait.
The animal has been described as about the size of a modern cow with a knobbly skull and bony plate armor on its back." Its teeth show it to have been a plant eater. It lived in an isolated desert region of the supercontinent of Pangaea some 260 million years ago. Its home region appears to have supported a distinctive fauna, in contrast to the rest of the supercontinent, where species were broadly distributed. It is particularly notable for the large bony knobs on its head, bigger than any seen in other species of pareiasaur. In life they were probably skin-covered horns or ossicones similar to those of modern giraffes. They are thought not to have served a protective function but were probably purely ornamental, perhaps aiding recognition between or within particular species.
Bunostegos may have been part of a relict population that clung on in central Pangaea, isolated from other more advanced species by the hyperarid conditions in which it lived. It is more closely related to older and more primitive pareiasaurs. The centre of the supercontinent appears to have been a very dry desert, which prevented population exchanges between the interior and exterior and kept Bunostegos in reproductive isolation. Only a few million years later, however, Bunostegos and most of the other pareiasaurs died out in the Permian–Triassic extinction event of 252 million years ago.
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