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This is the reason why many male reptiles (including birds) have crests, dewlaps and/or bright breeding colours. This means that instead of having to frequently engage in physical fights for dominance or feats of strength as a show of fitness, showing off bright display colours and/or structures usually suffice (though there are exceptions). By comparison, most reptiles (including birds) are tetrachromats, and thus possess colour vision far superior to our own, which is understandable given that many of them are diurnal, visually oriented animals. One explanation as to why male combat is especially prevalent in mammals as compared to birds & non-avian reptiles is that most mammals are dichromats, i.e., they can only see blues & greens. It's still unclear if males would've actually engaged in combat like modern ungulates, but if Jackson's chameleons are any indication, it may have been a very rare occurrence. The best-known modern reptile to possess such sexual dimorphism is the Jackson's chameleon ( Trioceros jacksonii).
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Such significant sexual dimorphism is rare in archosauromorphs and reptiles in general, but relatively common in mammals, particularly ungulates, several species of which have similar horns (this also means that other azendohsaurids may have possessed similar sexually dimorphic horns, but we have yet to find fossils of the hornless sex). This implies that Shringasaurus was probably sexually dimorphic, with only adult males having fully-formed horns. Even more interestingly, some fully-grown adults lack horns, while some juveniles have very small horns. While all the 3 taxa were herbivores, their differing morphologies indicate a good degree of niche partitioning: the short, lizard-like rhynchosaurs would've fed primarily upon roots, tubers & other tough, low-lying vegetation the dicynodonts would've been low-browsers feeding on ferns and club mosses, while the long-necked Shringasaurus was likely a proficient high-browser, much like the later sauropods, feeding on higher vegetation.įossils of Shringasaurus show the horns developed with age, with adults having larger horns than juveniles. The environment in which it lived is thought to have been a semi-arid, seasonal floodplain, not too dissimilar to the region today. It would've shared its ecosystem (what would become the Denwa Formation), with several other herbivores, including medium-large dicynodonts as well as a large rhynchosaur, another archosauromorph reptile. At 4m in length, Shringasaurus is the largest known azendohsaurid, and as of yet the only known species that possessed a pair of short cranial horns. Within this clade, Shringasaurus belonged to the Azendohsauridae, a family of medium to large herbivorous reptiles that appeared to have been on the same evolutionary trajectory as the sauropod dinosaurs (which had yet to appear). They weren't particularly closely related to the Archosauria (crocodylians, dinosaurs, pterosaurs & allies), but were still more closely related to them than to any other reptilian lineage. Shringasaurus (meaning horned lizard) was, despite the name, not a lizard but an allokotosaur, a clade of archosauromorph reptiles that lived in the Middle and Late Triassic and included a number of rather odd-looking taxa. A large male in breeding colours meanwhile struts around hoping to catch their attention. Cutting it a bit close but last entry for #triassicweekĪ pair of female Shringasaurus indicus browse on conifer leaves while a third basks on a rock.