New Dinosaur Was a Super Sniffer

Jasinski, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and curator
of paleontology and geology at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, was reviewing the museum's collection when he found a fossil that
caught his eye. “As soon as I looked at the specimen, I could tell it was not the dinosaur it was thought to have been,” he told Live Science.
The fossil was originally believed to be Saurornitholestes langstoni, a species within the
Dromaeosauridae family. Dromaeosaurs are colloquially referred to as raptors, due to the
popularization of a specific genus of
dromaeosaur: Velociraptor . [Paleo-Art: Dinosaurs Come to Life in Stunning Illustrations ]
The specimen is a skull fragment with an unusually large structure in the forebrain, known as the olfactory bulb. This suggests the dinosaur
had a sharp sense of smell, Jasinski said.
The dinosaur's acute nose likely helped it to be a
competitive predator, potentially by allowing it to hunt at night, the researchers said. This keen sense of smell could have also aided in
communication — namely, by helping the dinosaur detect chemical signatures called pheromones in other dinosaurs, which is crucial
for animals that live and hunt in packs.
Jasinski compared the fossil to other dromaeosaurs using holotype specimens, which essentially act as the dictionary definition of a species. Holotype specimens are agreed upon by scientists to be the most representative examples of an animal. Jasinski compared the
skull fragment to available samples in the western United States, Canada, Mongolia, China, and Europe, but his fossil remained unique. This gave him reasonable grounds to declare that he had found something entirely new:
Saurornitholestes sullivani .
S. sullivani was relatively small compared to other species alive during the late Cretaceous , but its
speed, agility, and impressive olfactory capability gave it a necessary advantage over other
predators. It could have brought down a meal and eaten quickly before a tyrannosaur could
come by and capitalize on the food. It was thriving about 8 million to 10 million years before the dinosaurs died out, when a good mix of
herbivores and carnivores were coexisting. At the time, a large seaway divided North America into
two major continents: Laramidia to the left of the seaway and Appalachia to the right. S. sullivani lived on the eastern portion of
Laramidia.