International Symposium on Palaeohistology

Every second year we have the International Symposium on Palaeohistology. This year it was in Brisbane, Australia. I presented ongoing research on the growth patterns of sauropodomorph dinosaurs. Sauropodomorph dinosaurs, the largest land animals to ever exist, evolved from small bipedal ancestors in the Carnian stage to multi-tonne giants by the end of the Triassic. They survived the end-Triassic mass extinction with little apparent impact on large-bodied lineages and surpassed all other terrestrial animals in size by the Middle Jurassic. A major evolutionary question concerns when they shifted from slow, intermittent growth to rapid, sustained growth. Our research, which includes the largest dataset yet from Late Triassic South African specimens, shows that both early sauropodomorphs and more derived forms like sauropodiforms exhibited interrupted growth from a young age.