The Carnegie Museum of Natural History might be closed to the public right now, but its staff is still busy with research — including the discovery of a reptile from the Late Paleozoic period that had a crucial role in shifting its species’ diet from eating insects to eating plants.

Martensius bromackerensis is part of a group of extinct reptiles called caseids, which show increasingly mammal-like characteristics. Four well-preserved Martensius skeletons, including a juvenile and an adult, were discovered between 1995 and 2006 at the Bromacker Quarry in Germany’s Thuringian Forest.

Researchers theorize that as juveniles, the animals’ teeth were equipped for eating insects, a diet that provided a source of gut bacteria which would help them better digest an adult diet of high-fiber, cellulose-rich plants, roots and tubers.

“This is an incredible find,” said Amy Henrici, research team member and collection manager of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Carnegie. “It has been theorized that among caseids, insectivores evolutionarily preceded herbivores. Martensius suggests this transition may have occurred … within its lifespan.”

A change in dental structure as adults seems to suggest that the reptiles shifted from eating exclusively bugs to adding more plants later in their lives.

“The adults also had these huge feet, and we thought they looked ideal for digging up tubers or pulling down plants,” Henrici said. “And because their rib cage is expanded and allows room for a large gut to ferment high-fiber plants, we know that it probably was herbivorous.”

Henrici and David Berman, the museum’s curator emeritus, are among the co-authors of a paper announcing the discovery.

“This has been a highlight of my career as a vertebrate paleontologist,” Berman said. “When the Bromacker excavation was begun in 1993 by an international team of colleagues that included Thomas Martens and me, we never anticipated the great number and variety of discoveries we would make and report on in about three dozen prominent scientific publications.”

Martensius bromackerensis’ name is part-tribute to Thomas Martens, and part-reference to where the skeletons were discovered.

In a similar way, when Berman and Henrici discovered a new genus and species of amphibian in 2010 on FedEx property near the Pittsburgh International Airport, it was appropriately named Fedexia striegeli.

One of the theories proposed in the paper is that a three-stage evolutionary change in caseids’ dental structure — from teeth more suited for eating insects, to teeth that allowed an omnivorous diet, to ultimately a set of teeth adapted for a regular herbivore — was part of what allowed its branch of the family tree to flourish.

“The last stage would explain … the global dispersal of the late Early and Middle Permian caseids, as it availed them to high-fiber plants, which during their appearance became a widespread abundant food source,” the paper reads.

Read the full paper at ResearchGate.com.

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