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Although the knowledge of bone histology of non-avian theropods has advanced considerably in recent decades, data about the bone tissue patterns, growth dynamics and ontogeny of some taxa such as abelisauroids are still limited. Here we describe the bone microstructure and growth dynamics of the Brazilian noasaurine  Vespersaurus paranaensis  using five femora and six tibiae and quantify the annual growth marks through retrocalculation of missing ones to estimate ontogenetic ages. The femoral series comprises four femoral histological classes (FHC I-IV), varying from two annuli or LAGs to seven LAGs. Femora show that sexual maturity was achieved around the seventh to tenth year of life, whereas the tibiae suggest it was earlier (around three to five years old). Tibiae represent three histological classes (THC I-III) displaying from three to nine LAGs. Two tibiae (THC III) exhibit an external fundamental system indicating that these specimens reached full skeletal size. The heterogeneous maturity observed in  Vespersaurus  hind limb bones could result from dierential allometry scaling between femora and tibiae length with the body length. The predominant parallel-fibered bone matrix suggests that  Vespersaurus  grew more slowly than most theropods, including other abelisauroids, in a pattern shared with the noasaurines  Masiakasaurus knopfleri  from Madagascar and CPPLIP 1490 from Brazil. This deviation from the typical theropod growth pattern may be mainly correlated with small body size, but also may related to resource limitation imposed by the arid climate prevailing in southwestern Gondwana during Cretaceous. Moreover, given the ecological and phylogenetic similarities among these taxa, such features would probably be apomorphic within Noasauridae.

Osteohistology and growth dynamics of the Brazilian noasauridVespersaurus paranaensisLanger et al., 2019 (Theropoda: Abelisauroidea)