News
Tuesday, June
23, 2009
Fun in the Chalk
It was a good trip...
We only got 2 days
of scouting in before getting rained out of the field on Saturday,
however we found some good new specimens.
Jacob Jett was able to find
his first mosasaur,
a Platecarpus specimen in the upper chalk of Logan County.
I stumbled upon
another mosasaur,
Platecarpus ictericus, about 30 feet further down the same
gully, and elsewhere on the same private ranch I discovered the hips of
a large diving
bird, Hesperornis.
Thursday
we spent the day excavating a giant fish
with Mike Everhart, currently identified
as Protosphyraena
gladius, however that seems likely to change in the next few years.
It was extremely hot and humid, with the temperature at 7:00pm at 103
degrees. The photograph
shows Mike Everhart,
Jacob Jett and a little
bit of Mike
Triebold at the excavation site.
Friday and Saturday
were spent excavating
the Platecarpus specimens, and all the fossils made it
safely back to our lab. Be sure to stop by in the next month to watch us
prepare these critters and more in our lab viewing area.
Off to the field!
No fossil of the
week this time, our field crew will be headed off to the
Niobrara
Chalk in western Kansas bright and early Wednesday morning to
investigate and recover more sea critters. I'll be taking lots of
photographs so you can all see who's there and what we do, even some of
the stuff we don't tell you about on our tours of the
RMDRC.
Currently in
the ground we have a small shark (probably
Squalicorax
falcatus),
a small (12 foot)
Xiphactinus
audax,
and a gigantic (18 foot plus)
Xiphactinus
that was partially poached from the rancher's property. Also, we'll
be
investigating a giant clam,
Platyceramus, in hopes of putting it on display in our
marine hall this summer. And who knows just what we may stumble upon
once we start scouting!
Fossil of the week:
6/9/09
Let's
talk big fish this week!
Ichthyodectid
fish are amongst the most common fish found in the
Niobrara
chalk. The genera
Prosaurodon,
Saurodon,
Saurocephalus,
Gillicus,
Ichthyodectes and the giant
Xiphactinus
are all found at various stratigraphic levels. Fish have very delicate
skulls, however many times they are recovered articulated. It is
impossible to disassemble these skulls without damaging them, so we
usually prepare them in profile view. Sometimes they are
disarticluated,
looking like they reenacted the final scene from "Jaws 3D". These
scattered skulls enable us to reassemble the
pieces
and take out some of the crushing distortion from 82-86 million years of
burial.
The photo is of a
specimen of
Saurodon
leanus
named "Tony" that I discovered in Logan County, Kansas in October of
2006.
Stratigraphically we're at about marker unit 18, so fairly high
in the chalk, nearing the Pierre Shale contact. This is one of the more
rare fish in the chalk, caricterized by it's long eel-like body and
distinctive chin spike. As you can see, the bones of the skull have
blown all apart, making this specimen a great candidate for molding and
3d reconstruction. No one is quite sure what the spike is used for, my
guess is probing into the bottom
mud of
the western interior seaway looking for soft bodied invertebrates (such
as worms) to eat. Hopefully we'll find more specimens in the future that
may include stomach contents.
Fossil of the week:
5/29/09
This
past week I was attending the 8th
Conference on Fossil Resources in St. George, UT. The second group of talks
all focused on the
Campanian aged flora and fauna of the western interior. A few brief
mentions of the poor neglected duckbill dinosaur fauna were made, but I
wanted to share with you an image of one that I'd love to find: "The
duckbill that ate
Manhattan!" Paleo
Tech Jacob Jett
(6'4" tall, shown back in his younger days) is shown for scale.
This
isolated rib bone was discovered in the upper Judith River Formation (Campanian
aged) in the summer of 2004 while excavating a
centrosaurine
horned dinosaur called "UTC".
Isolated duckbill skeletal remains are not uncommon at dig sites. In
fact, juvenile
hadrosaur jaws have been found at both our "Joyce" and "Pete 3"
sites in the same area.
Unfortunately, isolated
postcranial
remains on
hadrosaurs aren't very diagnostic, so it is impossible to say
which critter this rib belongs to. It is a good deal longer than our
longest rib on "Big Ed", the 34 foot long
Edmontosaurus
annectens
that is now on display in Korea. I'd estimate the body length of this
duckbill to be at least 40 feet.
About
Our Lab
The Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center is home to one of the largest
fossil preparation labs in the world. Here, paleontologists and Paleo
Technicians painstakingly remove rock and glue from fossils in order to ready
them for display. In some cases, the most important of these fossils are later
molded so their casts may be displayed in museums around the world. Working on
specimens new to science is a common occurrence.
Past
Projects
Some of
our previous projects may be seen on display at the RMDRC as well as museums
worldwide. Here's a list of some of our previous efforts:
