Abstract
The dinosaur Plateosaurus engelhardti is the most abundant dinosaur in the Late Triassic of Europe and the best known basal sauropodomorph. Plateosaurus engelhardti was one of the first sauropodomorph dinosaurs to display a large body size. Remains can be found in the Norian stage of the Late Triassic in over 40 localities in Central Europe (France, Germany, and Switzerland) and in Greenland. Since the first discovery of P. engelhardti no juvenile specimens of this species had been described in detail. Here we describe the first remains of juvenile individuals, isolated cervical and dorsal neural arches from Switzerland. These were separated postmortem from their respective centra because of unfused neurocentral sutures. However the specimens share the same neural arch morphology found in adults. Morphometric analysis suggests body lengths of the juvenile individuals that is greater than those of most adult specimens. This supports the hypothesis of developmental plasticity in Plateosaurus engelhardti that previously had been based on histological data only. Alternative hypotheses for explaining the poor correlation between ontogenetic stage and size in this taxon are multiple species or sexual morphs with little morphological variance or time-averaging of individuals from populations differing in body size.
Highlights
The basal Sauropodomorpha are a presumably paraphyletic assemblage (Yates, 2003a; Yates & Kitching, 2003; Yates, 2004; Upchurch, Barrett & Galton, 2007) and form successive sistergroups to the largest terrestrial animals ever known, the Sauropoda, with which they form the Sauropodomorpha (von Huene, 1932)
Description Among the juvenile bones, there are six isolated neural arches that can be assigned to the cervical vertebral column
We identified eleven dorsal neural arches from the bone field 11.3. sample
Summary
The basal Sauropodomorpha are a presumably paraphyletic assemblage (Yates, 2003a; Yates & Kitching, 2003; Yates, 2004; Upchurch, Barrett & Galton, 2007) and form successive sistergroups to the largest terrestrial animals ever known, the Sauropoda, with which they form the Sauropodomorpha (von Huene, 1932). Basal sauropodomorphs were the dominant high-browsing herbivores from the late Norian until the end of the Early Jurassic, when they were replaced in dominance by sauropods (Barrett & Upchurch, 2005). The basal sauropodomorph Plateosaurus was one of the first larger-bodied dinosaurs. How to cite this article Hofmann and Sander (2014), The first juvenile specimens of Plateosaurus engelhardti from Frick, Switzerland: isolated neural arches and their implications for developmental plasticity in a basal sauropodomorph. The first to describe the material was Herman von Meyer in 1837 naming it Plateosaurus engelhardti (Moser, 2003)
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