Question 1

How do you say Bunostegos?

Accepted Answer

Bunostegos is pronounced boo-no-STEE-goss. Break it into four parts: BOO, like boo in ghost, then NO, then STEE with the stress on that syllable, then GOSS at the end. The stress falls on the third part, STEE, so say it like this: boo-no-STEE-goss. A good memory trick is to think of it as BOO, NO, STEE-ring a boat, GOSS.

Question 2

What does Bunostegos mean?

Accepted Answer

Bunostegos comes from two Ancient Greek words. Bounos means knob or rounded mound, and stegos means roof or covering. So the name means something like knobbed roof, which is a direct description of the animal's most dramatic feature: the large, raised bony lumps that covered the top of its skull. The species name akokanensis refers to Akokan, the town in Niger near where the fossils were found.

Question 3

What kind of animal was Bunostegos?

Accepted Answer

Bunostegos was a pareiasaur, which is a type of parareptile. It was not a dinosaur. Pareiasaurs were a group of heavily built, mostly plant-eating reptiles that lived during the Permian period, before dinosaurs even existed. Bunostegos was roughly the size of a cow and walked on four legs across the ancient desert of what is now Niger in West Africa.

Question 4

Why did Bunostegos have so many bumps on its head?

Accepted Answer

The exact purpose of the skull knobs on Bunostegos is not fully understood, but scientists know they were far larger than those of any other pareiasaur, making Bunostegos stand out even within its own group. Other pareiasaurs had smaller bony bumps and ridges on their skulls, so the feature was not unique to Bunostegos, just taken to an extreme degree. Some researchers think these kinds of features in reptiles can relate to species recognition or display, but no firm conclusion has been reached for Bunostegos specifically.

Question 5

Where did Bunostegos live?

Accepted Answer

Bunostegos lived in what is now the Agadez Region of Niger in West Africa, but during the Late Permian about 252 million years ago, that location was the scorched interior of Pangaea, the ancient supercontinent that combined all of today's landmasses into one. Scientists believe this region was a vast desert, far from any ocean, with extreme heat and seasonal droughts. It is one of the harshest environments any large vertebrate animal is known to have lived in.

Question 6

Was Bunostegos really isolated from other animals?

Accepted Answer

That is exactly what a major 2013 study argued. Paleontologist Linda Tsuji and colleagues analyzed the anatomy of Bunostegos in detail and concluded that its unique combination of features, including its oversized skull knobs and possibly more upright limbs, pointed to a long period of evolutionary isolation. The deep desert of central Pangaea appears to have worked like an ocean barrier, keeping Bunostegos's population cut off from pareiasaurs living in other parts of the world for millions of years.

Question 7

When was Bunostegos discovered?

Accepted Answer

Bunostegos akokanensis was formally named and described in 2003 by paleontologist Christian Sidor, Oumarou Ide, and colleagues. The fossils came from the Moradi Formation in the Agadez Region of Niger. The species name akokanensis honors the town of Akokan near the fossil site, following the common paleontological tradition of naming a species after the place where it was found.

Question 8

Did Bunostegos survive the Permian extinction?

Accepted Answer

No. Bunostegos lived right at the end of the Permian period, around 252 million years ago, which placed it dangerously close to the end-Permian mass extinction, the worst extinction event in Earth's history. That catastrophe wiped out roughly 90 percent of all species on Earth. Pareiasaurs as a group did not survive into the Triassic period, and Bunostegos almost certainly perished along with the vast majority of life on the planet during that global collapse.

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