Please enjoy these very fine Edmontosaurus bones!
The special issue on this bonebed came about when Mike Burns
and I got to talking about how the
Albertosaurus Bonebed special issue had been
such a good motivation for the lab to do some collaborative projects, and given
that the
PALEO 400 fieldschool students needed to develop research projects on
the bonebed, wouldn't it make sense to try to polish those into publishable
form as well? This was back in 2012, and at that point there'd been 6 years of
really good fieldschool students who had come up with a variety of interesting
small-scale independent research projects. We put out a call to current and
former students to see if anyone would be interested in expanding their project
and contributing it to the volume, and also invited some of our colleagues who
were working on hadrosaurs and/or bonebeds in some way to see if they would be
interested in working on the material as well. Not all of the former students
contributed papers, but I was really pleased by the number who did – it's a big
job to get a paper through peer-review, and I'm really proud of all the
first-time papers in this issue!
It's also been really rewarding to watch our
volunteer fossil prep program grow over the years I was at the UofA – we started with a
few volunteers here and there, but in recent years we've had as many as 8-12
people working in the lab on a weekday evening. We run two shifts of volunteers
– an evening program from 5-7pm on some combination of Mondays to Thursdays,
depending on the schedules of the grad students who supervise the volunteers,
and a daytime program by appointment in our larger basement laboratory with the
larger and more challenging projects. Most people start in our evening lab
programs, and many of the bones prepared during those hours were from the Danek
bonebed. The Danek material is amazingly good for volunteers – with a bit of
soaking, the surrounding shaley matrix flakes off the relatively durable bones.
We would never have gotten through all of that material so quickly without the
dedicated help of a very large crew of volunteers! If you're reading this from
Edmonton and are interested in volunteering in the
DinoLab, follow our Facebookpage for up-to-date contact information and hours.
Ian is a shoveling machine!
Although I haven't gone out to the bonebed for the full 3
weeks each year, I've tried to get out at least a little bit each year, even if
it's only for 'overburden removal' days. It's amazing how much dirt we've moved
since my first year there in 2007! Because the bonebed is located in a nature
preserve, we need to be a bit careful with how we handle the overburden – we can't
let too much sediment get into the creek, and we also can't just cover up
existing plants. What we've taken to doing is removing the topsoil from a
'meadow' nearby, evenly spreading the relatively sterile Quaternary
sands/gravels in the clearing, and then 'replanting' the topsoil overtop and
sprinkling with local plant seeds. We dig in the early spring, and by July the
area is so green you'd never even know we had disturbed it. The bonebed is a beautiful place to work - we see lots of interesting wildlife because of the stream nearby, the matrix surrounding the bones is soft and incredibly easy to work with, and the bones are plentiful.
Clearing the 'meadow'.
Sometimes it's cold in April in Edmonton!
One of the things we mentioned in the
press materials for
the special volume is the presence of other dinosaur fossils throughout
Edmonton and the surrounding areas. I have a hunch that if you dig pretty much
anywhere in Edmonton, you're probably going to hit a dinosaur bone at some
point. There've been dinosaurs in the sewers and dinosaurs in the pipelines,
and dinosaur bones pop up along the North Saskatchewan River with relative
frequency. If you think you've found a dinosaur bone in Edmonton, make sure you
understand the
laws protecting fossils in Alberta – you need a permit to dig up
fossils in Alberta, and fossils should be stored in accredited facilities like
the Royal Tyrrell Museum of the University of Alberta Laboratory for Vertebrate
Paleontology. But if you find something, tell the University of Alberta about
it! Take a picture of what you found, and if you have the ability to mark the
latitude and longitude with a GPS or your phone, do that too. You can get in
touch with us via the
DinoLab Facebook page. Maybe you will be the next person
to stumble across a dinosaur in your city!
Not in Edmonton? The Danek Bonebed is where much of the taphonomy and fieldwork lesson for
Dino101 was filmed! The 4th session of
Dino101 started today, so go have a look if you're interested in learning more about the bonebed.
