Similar designs, 100 million years apart
With a distinctive, bony crest that dominates much of its forehead, scientists have long felt that Rusingoryx atopocranion — a distant, extinct relative of the wildebeest — was, to put it mildly, unusual. But until Assistant Professor of Anthropology Christian Tryon and colleagues, including Haley O’Brien of Ohio University, got their hands on a number of complete Rusingoryx skulls, it wasn’t clear just how strange the animal was. Despite being separated by more than 100 million years of evolution, tests showed the crest was remarkably similar to the structure of the skulls of “duck-billed” crested hadrosaur dinosaurs. Like hadrosaurs, Rusingoryx likely used it as a resonating chamber to communicate with others or warn of predators. The study is described in a paper published earlier this year in Current Biology. “Some aspects of the shape of the skull jumped out right away as something that was unusual. As my colleague put it, only a...