A preliminary report on intraskeletal histological variation of basal neoceratopsian Protoceratops andrewsi

Abstract

Determining relative age and growth stage of dinosaurs are crucial to understand dinosaur paleobiology. Various workers have determined growth rates of several dinosaur species based on multi skeletal elements. For age assessment, the most of current histological works rely on analyzing hind limbs such as femur and tibia. In this research, we compared microstructures of fore- and hind limb elements of ceratopsian dinosaur Protoceratops andrewsi. Preliminary result shows that tibia and humerus may be viable candidates for determining relative age of P. andrewsi. However, histology of juvenile P. andrewsi exhibit slightly different histology.