Edmontosaurus in Edmonton

Happy 2015, readers! So many exciting things are happening right now – the Dino Hunt Canada website launched a few weeks ago and the documentary will air on History Channel Canada later this month, things are chugging away here in North Carolina, and the Danek Edmontosaurus Bonebed special issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences was published just before Christmas. There's already been lots of great coverage of the special issue, but I wanted to share a few thoughts here as well.

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!

Albertosaurus tooth!

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.

Discovering Dinosaurs, Revealing Teamwork

It's a wonderful feeling when you get to be part of something that celebrates teamwork.

Yesterday was the opening reception for the University of Alberta's new exhibit, Discovering Dinosaurs: The Story of Alberta's Dinosaursas told through U of A Research. The exhibit features the work of almost all of the current people in Phil Currie's lab, as well as many of our alumni and colleagues.

The exhibit focuses in on research projects and new discoveries at the university. You'll see lots of fossils and casts, but you'll also see plenty of panels like this one featuring my work on ankylosaur tail clubs. (To see more of the folks in our lab featured in the exhibit, check out the DinoLab's Facebook album.) I really like this approach, because it shows that science is done by real people, and it shows the specific kinds of questions that we ask in order to tell the bigger stories about dinosaur lives. How DO we find out if ankylosaurs used their tail clubs as weapons? What kinds of techniques do we use? What surprises do we encounter as palaeontologists?

 

There's so many great stories in the exhibit, and I think the focus on dinosaur parts rather than full skeletons means we get to focus on the subtler bits of anatomy that might be missed in a room full of giant skeletons. (Not that I don't like a good room full of skeletons!). The exhibit is divided into several themed rooms – this one is obviously the theropod shrine, but you'll also get to see ankylosaurs, hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, and birds, and some non-dinosaurs, too!

Even vertebrate microsites get some love in the exhibit.

 

I think this is particularly fun – take a peek inside our camp kitchen tent in the Mongolian fieldwork room, and see some film footage from the early days of collecting at the university and from more recent work in the PALEO 400 field school at the Danek Bonebed.

 

Edmonton-based palaeoartist extraordinaire Julius Csotonyi provided much of the art you'll see throughout the exhibit, including life-sized restorations of the species featured in the exhibit. I think this is really effective – the specimens are the data, the research stories are the process, and the art shows how it all comes together in the end to reconstruct these extinct animals.

 

It's really cool to see some of the specimens I've only known as trays in cabinets come to life as full skeletons. On one level you 'know' how complete a skeleton is, but it's still a bit surprising, even to me, just how good some of our specimens are. We have good fossils, you guys!

 

This will probably sound corny, but it was somewhat emotionally moving for me to see UALVP 31 all laid out and on display. This was one of the most important ankylosaur specimens for my work on revising the taxonomy of Euoplocephalus, and I did a lot of the prep work on the postcrania in conjunction with my colleagues Mike Burns, Robin Sissons, and Kristina Barclay, and with WISEST summer research students Carmen Chornell and Idel Reimer. (See what I mean about teamwork?). We also added in UALVP 47273 waaayy down at the other end, the tail club that Phil Bell found the year before I joined the lab and which was super important for my work on tail club biomechanics.

I'll finish off here, but know that this is only a tiny sampling of what's in store for you at the exhibit. I hope you'll check it out and learn something new. Discovering Dinosaurs is on display at the Enterprise Square Galleries in downtown Edmonton from now until January 31^st, 2015. There's a great series of K-12 education programs associated with the exhibit, as well as a fun program of speakers and events for the general public over the next few weeks (if you want to hear more about ankylosaurs, I'll be speaking on September 27th!). You can also check out our permanent exhibit in the Paleontology Museum in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Building on campus. Not in Edmonton? You can still join the fun with Dino101, our massive open online course that's currently underway at Coursera.

Too many things!

Things have been quiet around this blog as of late because there have been TOO MANY THINGS. There are still too many things, but I figured I'd do a quick update as to the goings-on around these parts over the summer.

JUNE:

Jasper! I finally had a chance to visit during the summer. No dinosaurs, but lots of rocks and charismatic megafauna, so I was happy.

Another presentation for the Jurassic Forest! I talked about the ankylosaurs of Alberta. Thanks to everyone who came out to hear about the ugliest dinosaurs in our backyards.

Jurassic Forest has also opened some trail extensions discussing the evolution of mammals, and the evolution of birds. Kudos to the team at Jurassic Forest for tackling these subjects, which are super interesting and don't always get the attention they deserve (especially the origin of mammals!).

(And I like their dinosaur wrangler, too!)

JULY:

Dino101! This project has occupied a lot of my time since January. Filming was in full swing over the summer, including some scenes in our labs and museums on campus.

Body Worlds, at Telus World of Science - Edmonton! Sadly, no photos of the exhibit were allowed. I had seen the original Body Worlds exhibition in 2007, and this included largely the same plastinates and information, but presented in the context of growth and aging. However, a surprise bonus plastinate at the end tickled my fancy - they had an ostrich (presumably from Animal Inside Out?) on display!

It had been a while since I was last at TWOSE, and I found the renovated earth and environment gallery to be excellent and full of science. Make sure to check out the Science on a Sphere!

The body gallery always cracks me up.

AUGUST:

Canadian Paleontology Conference! and University of Alberta Laboratory for Vertebrate Paleontology 50th Anniversary Symposium! I was on the organizing committee, which kept me hopping for a lot of August. Thanks to everyone who came out last weekend. You can read more about the conference at our website.

THE FUTURE: I'm finishing my thesis this fall. My plate is pretty full with writing, job applications, and teaching (Dino101, and its sister-courses PALEO 200 and PALEO 201 at the UofA). I've got a couple of manuscripts that should be online pretty soon. Things will probably continue to be fairly quiet here, but hopefully I'll have some time to blog a little bit about research and SVP along the way. After December...well, who knows where I'll be then. Finishing things is always a little bit sad. But, onwards and upwards! Until next time!

What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Danek Bonebed

The summer is over and school is back in session. Here in Edmonton the leaves already started to turn yellow last week. And somehow the summer got so busy that I hardly posted anything at all here. So, it's nice to fix that up and talk about what I did on my summer 'vacation', by which I mean the time that undergrads are not at university but grad students are.

 

The 'summer' (which doesn't really start until mid-June in Edmonton, but whatevs) started up with the PALEO 400 field school in early May. For three weeks, students help excavate the Danek Bonebed, a hadrosaur bonebed located right in the city (but in a secret location, to prevent vandalism). Over the course of those three weeks, they get to do everything: shoveling lots of dirt, uncovering bones with fine tools, plaster jacketing, carrying heavy things back to the truck, quarry mapping, field identification, you name it. Each student comes up with a research project related to the bonebed and writes a paper and/or presents a talk in October. This year we had five enthusiastic students and I am looking forward to hearing all about their projects later this fall.

 

 

 

The Danek Bonebed is in a protected nature area, and as such we have to follow special rules to protect the surrounding environment. To prevent sediment runoff into the adjacent creek, we have to be careful about how we dispose of our unwanted dirt and rocks. This involves clearing an area in the forest nearby and removing and saving the topsoil. All of our dirt is evenly distributed in the cleared area, and at the end of the fieldwork the topsoil is places on top of the spoil pile. This helps the vegetation regrow more easily.

 

Once the spoil area is prepared, we can beginning digging in the actual quarries. We have been excavating this bonebed since 2006, and our three quarries are starting to get pretty large. This part is really hard work and quite time consuming, but luckily there are always lots of hands to take turns shoveling, carrying buckets, and hauling the wheelbarrow.

 

 

 

Here's the main quarry as of this year. The notch cut out in the foreground is the newly excavated area for 2012. Most of the sediment overlying the bonebed is glacial till and/or fluvial sediments, much of which is fairly easy to shovel except for the large boulders sitting immediately above the bonebed. The trickiest part this year was getting through some of the frozen soil, which required pickaxing. Yup, in May the ground was still frozen.

 

 

 

The original quarry, shown here, was first excavated by the Royal Tyrrell Museum in the late 1980s. We have expanded it a little over the last few years, and it proved to be the most productive area this year.

 

 

Almost all of the bones in the bonebed are from a large hadrosaurid (duck-billed dinosaur). We don't really find articulated skeletons, but lots of isolated, jumbled elements. The sediment around the bones is really easy to remove - no hammers and chisels required, just garden trowels and dental picks. The bonebed is within the Horseshoe Canyon Formation, although I'm not sure exactly which unit.

 

Once the bones come back to the university we have a pretty dedicated team of volunteers who help clean them up during our evening volunteer prep program.

LogiCON and the Paleo Gala

Fieldwork has begun here in Edmonton and I'll have some more pictures to show off next week...currently we are digging a big hole in the dirt, so there's not much to see yet. Until then, here's a wrap-up of some of my outreach and teaching activities from the last few weeks.

In addition to the Alberta Paleontological Society Symposium, I was asked to give a talk at a local skeptic's conference, called LogiCON. This was a pretty neat event with lots of interesting speakers divided into three 'tracks' - beginner, advanced, and family. I gave both a family-track and advanced-track talk, which may have been a little overly ambitious, but worked out in the end. For the family-track talk, I did "The Wonderful World of Dinosaurs", which was essentially an overview of the kinds of dinosaurs found in Alberta and a little bit about how palaeontologists study dinosaurs. There are lots of well-known Albertan dinosaurs, so I also included some lesser-known taxa like Chirostenotes (using the Smithsonian's caenagnathid mount as a stand-in), Albertonykus (using Mononykus), and the newly-named leptoceratopsids Unescoceratops and Gryphoceratops.

For the advanced-track talk, I thought about talking about dinosaurs as ambassadors of evolution, but didn't really feel like talking about creationism, so instead I opted for "The Dinosaur Family Tree", a talk about...systematics! Complete with data matrix! Woohoo! Actually, this seemed to go over fairly well, as I went through the problems that palaeontologists (and most biologists) face when trying to reconstruct the tree of life: understanding sources of variation, defining a species, and running phylogenetic analyses. And we talked about what makes a dinosaur a dinosaur, as well. The diagram above is based off a specimen on display at the U of A Paleo Museum (UALVP 300, a composite of three individuals), with various dinosauromorph, dinosauriform, and dinosaurian features.

Finally, a few weeks ago I helped organize the annual U of A Paleo Gala, an event hosted by Dr. Michael Caldwell, which raises funds for specimen acquisition, research, and grad student scholarships. It's a fancy dinner held at our faculty club, and the grad students put up posters and show off new specimens and research. There are silent and live auction items much like at SVP, and you can usually count on a song or two by John Acorn, the Nature Nut.

Those of you who were at the SVP in Las Vegas may recognize a few of the larger faces in this crowd... other recent acquisitions largely include specimens for our teaching collection, like casts of Tiktaalik, Anhanguera, Eotitanosuchus (=?Biarmosuchus), and Dinodontosaurus.

Well, that about covers it for now! Next week, the field!

Cool Stuff

"Cool Stuff: The University of Alberta Museums Do Winter" is a winter-themed exhibit that opened last week at the U of A's Enterprise Square location. I checked it out last weekend and was pleased to see so many different types of objects on display. We have 28 different collections on campus, and most (maybe all?) were represented in the exhibit - butterflies, moss, picked parasites, textiles, and more. 

The University of Alberta Laboratory for Vertebrate Paleontology contributed fossils from our Grande Prairie and Edmonton dinosaur bonebed excavations. Although we usually collect stuff in the summer, we've had snow during our Edmonton fieldwork, even in May.

We showed off some field jackets, too. The Monoclonius and ornithomimid are pretty self-explanatory, and if I recall correctly, "Skull B" is from the Wapiti bonebed in Grande Prairie. There were also photos from our December tyrannosaur helicopter lift in Dinosaur Provincial Park, including a photo taken by me!

Last spring we purchased a cast of the Cryolophosaurus original non-reconstructed skull for both teaching and research, but it fit in perfectly with the exhibition theme! The grey slab behind the skull is the Wonder Block from the MOTH locality, which has a variety of 'jawless fish'. Phil will be giving a talk about his 2011 Antarctic expedition on March 1, as part of the exhibition's speaker series.

The exhibition also features specimens from our zoology collections, including these Arctic and sub-Arctic mammals (caribou, deer, and walrus).

"Cool Stuff" mixes natural history objects with cultural heritage objects, and in particular I was pleased to see so many Inuit and Inuvaliut art pieces. I am always astounded by whalebone sculptures like this one.

Another display had Inuit dolls, musical instruments, hunting tools, and boots. The beautiful paintings in the background are the original art from Ted Harrison's "A Northern Alphabet". Click the photo to make it bigger, and see if you can figure out what letter each painting represents.

"Cool Stuff" is open until March 4, and admission is free. It was cool, go check it out. 

Spared no expense.

Well, this weekend marked a major milestone for me: I saw Jurassic Park on the big screen for the very first time! Although I have watched it countless times, first on VHS and then on DVD, Victoria in 1993 was only 9 years old, squeamish, and easily scared by, well, scary stuff, and thus too small to see Jurassic Park during its initial theatrical release. 

The film was being shown as part of Alberta Innovates - Health Solutions film series called Science in the Cinema. They feature films with a biomedical slant, and ask health science and biomedical researchers to do a Q & A after the film. In Edmonton, the movies are shown at a cool old theatre called the Garneau Theatre, and admission is free (with free popcorn, too!).

For Jurassic Park, they also asked if some students from my lab could come out to talk about dinosaurs, and so Scott and I brought along some fossils to show off before and after the movie. We are lucky to have casts of many of the dinosaurs featured in Jurassic Park, so we brought along casts of Gallimimus, Tyrannosaurus, and of course, Velociraptor. We also brought along some sturdy, real, touchable Edmontosaurus fossils from a bonebed in Edmonton, which were also a big hit.

There were a lot of good questions about both the genetics and palaeontology sides of Jurassic Park, and apparently there were about 450 people in the audience. It was fun to see good ol' Jurassic Park with an enthusiastic crowd of people who obviously knew the film well, and lots of younger kids who were seeing it for the first time. It has held up surprisingly well, and I maintain that the computer animation in Jurassic Park, which was the first time that realistic living creatures were created using that technique, is still some of the best computer animation ever. Yes, there are some inaccuracies, and yes, the theropods should be feathered, but overall for a film that is now 19 years old, it's not too shabby. ("Cool, it's an interactive CD-ROM!" and "It's a UNIX system! I KNOW this!" both got some pretty big laughs.)

You know field season is well underway when...

...one of the prep labs already looks like this!

These dark grey bones are this year's harvest of hadrosaur material from the Danek bonebed located within the city of Edmonton. The U of A offers a fourth-year vertebrate palaeontology field course (PALEO 400), which for the last several years has taken place at this bonebed. It's an excellent locality as students can return home in the evening, it is easy to access, the matrix is comparatively soft and the bones are comparatively hard. Each student participates in three weeks of fieldwork and will do either a research paper or talk based on the bonebed.

The bonebed has only been described in a few conference abstracts so far, so I won't say too much about it. I can say that we have collected quite a lot of material, and it is pretty neat to have a dinosaur bonebed right within a large city. We have excavated an area adjacent to a creek, and it is a very nice spot to sit and dig all day. I did not make it out this year because of travel, but here are a few photos from the first year we worked this site, 2007.

The bonebed is quite photogenic and several times local news have come to the site to do stories (we even made it onto the National one time). The density may not be as great as some of the ceratopsian bonebeds in Alberta like the Pipestone Creek Pachyrhinosaurus bonebed, but there are still a lot of bones in the relatively small areas we have excavated.

Now I did just say that the bonebed is a very pleasant place to work...except for when it snows. Yes, this is what the bonebed looked like during the 2010 field school, which was held in MAY. The students dutifully shoveled snow before shoveling dirt...

Dinosaur bones can also be encountered in the North Saskatchewan River valley, but generally only as very scrappy fragments. Last fall hadrosaur and tyrannosaur bits were discovered during excavations for a new sewer, which I discussed in the Edmonton's Sewersaurus post. From what I understand, the preservation is similar to what we find at the Danek bonebed. I would bet that there's a good chance if you dug deep enough pretty much anywhere in Edmonton, you'd find dinosaur bones.