A Body for Terrible Hands

It was a whirlwind year for dinosaur palaeontology, yet again. This week I'm writing about what I consider the most important news in my science field for 2014, for the Science Borealis blog carnival. There are so many great stories to choose from! Kulindadromeus and feather-like structures in ornithischians? The bizarro new reconstruction of a short-legged Spinosaurus? Both of those stories were pretty interesting, but my choice has to be the description of multiple skeletons of the Mongolian ornithomimosaur Deinocheirus.

If you like dinosaurs, there's a good chance you've heard about Deinocheirus before, even if it's not quite a household name like Stegosaurus or Triceratops. Deinocheirus (which means "Terrible Hands") was found during the Polish-Mongolian expeditions in the 1960s, and up until very recently has only been known by this single specimen, a pair of tremendous arms. And I do mean tremendous!

Me, in 2007, mimicking the 'zombie arms' of Deinocheirus, rather convincingly if I do say so myself.

A few years ago, the quarry for this holotype specimen was relocated and some gastralia (belly ribs) were found and described, but besides that this has been it. What on earth did the rest of this dinosaur look like? Was it a carnivore, herbivore, or something else? Where did it fit in the Cretaceous Gobi ecosystem?

While the exact evolutionary relationships of Deinocheirus have been enigmatic, there's been a general consensus that it was some kind of ornithomimosaur, or ostrich-mimic dinosaur. Even if you're not a dino-buff, you'll recognize ornithomimids as the stampeding dinosaurs in Jurassic Park – Gallimimus was the one 'flocking this way', and, conveniently, Gallimimus is a commonly encountered fossil in the Upper Cretaceous rocks of the Gobi Desert and would have lived alongside Deinocheirus. Where Gallimimus is an elegant, sprightly kind of dinosaur, Deinocheirus, it turns out, is not at all, not even a little bit.

It turns out that Deinocheirus is even more surprising than we would have ever guessed; the giant arms are nothing compared to the weirdness of the rest of its skeleton. Deinocheirus looks like a cross between a therizinosaur and a hadrosaur. It's a big, broad-bellied ornithomimosaur with a 'sail' of heightened neural spines on its vertebrae, and a widened, shovel-like snout with a deep jaw and tiny eyes. It looks like it was adapted for eating vegetation and had gastroliths preserved in its stomach region, but also had fish scales in there as well, prompting the authors to describe it as a megaomnivore, which is among my new favourite words of the year. Given that its close relatives the ornithomimids are known to have had feathers, as well as many other theropod dinosaurs, it is most likely that Deinocheirus had at least some feathers.

Deinocheirus, by the always-incredible Michael Skrepnick.

I will forever be jealous of my colleague Derek Larson, who was on the 2009 Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Project expedition that found the new skeletons of Deinocheirus (I was there just a year later, and it was a great year...but no Deinocheirus). I'm so thrilled that I've been able to see the original bones in person, and they really are quite something to see – I hope that the specimen will eventually be mounted and put on display so everyone can see it for themselves, too!

The "Canadian contingent" (which actually includes at least one American and one Australian, but let's not be too picky) at the 2013 Hwaseong International Dinosaurs Expedition Symposium last December, gawking away at Deinocheirus.

Deinocheirus is also an important reminder that Mongolian fossils are under threat. Sadly, many probably excellent skeletons are removed illegally from Mongolia every year – no fossils are allowed to leave the country without a permit, and none can be sold, so any fossils from "Central Asia" on the auction blocks are almost certainly stolen goods. The Deinocheirus skull had made its way out of Mongolia some years ago, and was, thankfully, repatriated to Mongolia when word of the new skeletons began to circulate throughout the palaeontological community. Incredibly, the skull actually belonged to one of the newly collected skeletons! This is a story that could have ended very differently – we might not have known about the strange skull of Deinocheirus because of fossil poaching.

Poached fossils make everybody sad! Here Phil Currie is showing the remains of a tyrannosaur skull that was improperly collected by poachers and destroyed in the process.

So why choose Deinocheirus over Kulindadromeus or Spinosaurus? Like I said, all three are top contenders for the most surprising finds of 2014. In some ways, the fuzz of Kulindadromeus is less surprising, and its significance lies in the fact that it lends support to the hypothesis that fuzz was present in most dinosaurian clades. Spinosaurus has also long been considered a specialist in aquatic foods, so while the new skeletal revision is certainly weird, it's not quite a fundamental re-envisioning of this beast. But Deinocheirus is way beyond what anyone would have ever predicted the rest of the skeleton would have looked like, and just goes to show that there are surprises waiting around every corner for us when it comes to dinosaur diversity. And, in my opinion, Deinocheirus leads to even more questions than it answered: what was it doing with that sail; why is its jaw so deep and its eyes so small; what kind of environment produces a megaomnivore like that; are any of the bits and pieces of what we thought was Gallimimus actually parts of juvenile Deinocheirus? I could go on and on.

Congratulations to my colleagues in Korea and Mongolia for organizing the Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Project expeditions – I'm sure this is just the first of many wonderful projects that will result from those years of fieldwork.

Back to Hwaseong

This week I've been in Hwaseong city, Korea for the HwaseongInternational Dinosaurs Expedition Symposium. I started this blog back in 2010 as a way to document my experiences working in the dino lab in Hwaseong, and so it was wonderful to be able to return more than three years later and see what's new. The symposium highlights research following the conclusion of the five-year Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Project. Many thanks to Dr. Yuong-Nam Lee, the city of Hwaseong, and all of the other organizers and staff who invited us to present our work at this excellent conference!

 

It was a special treat to see the new ankylosaur skeleton prepared and mounted in the lobby of our hotel! Watch out Tarbosaurus, you're about to get a face full of tail club.

Outside the main event room, the city had set up the winning entries from a local crafts contest themed around Koreaceratops. There were some awesome items on display!

It was also wonderful to eat real Korean food again! So tasty.

Hwaseong is home to dinosaur nesting sites as well as the holotype of Koreaceratops. There's a new observation tower on the hill above the reclaimed salt marsh which gives an excellent view of the area. The islands in the midground are Cretaceous egg-bearing rocks, but apparently the hill we're on in this photo, and the hills in the distances, are Precambrian basement.

Heading on out to see some of the nests!

The outside of the visitor centre has undergone a dramatic transformation, and now hosts a gigantic bas relief of Julius Csotonyi's Koreaceratops illustration.

Koreaceratops has also replaced the old Protoceratops model inside the centre. We also had a chance to check out some really special specimens collected during the expeditions that have now been prepared, but they are secret until published, so I can't share photos here! Needless to say, there are some wonderful papers coming down the pipeline resulting from these expeditions. On to the next adventure!

Dino Gangs

I’m late to the party again with the recent spate of dino documentaries, but I thought I’d review a couple here on the blog over the next few weeks. Today I wanted to take a look at Dino Gangs, a documentary featuring my PhD supervisor Dr. Phil Currie as well as several scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum.




Dino Gangs explores the idea of gregariousness in tyrannosaurs, and especially the idea that some tyrannosaurs may have engaged in cooperative pack hunting. There are two versions out there, the one shown in the UK and the shorter one aired in the US, and I think I have watched the UK version.

Whether or not you agree with the gregariousness hypothesis, I think Dino Gangs does a bang-up job of showing the process of the science of palaeontology. It introduces a fairly contentious topic (gregariousness in dinosaurs) and the reasons why this idea exists, and then shows the various lines of evidence used to support this idea. We see palaeontologists working in two different field localities (Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park in Alberta, and Bugin Tsav in Mongolia). We see the prep lab in Hwaseong-si, South Korea, where I spent much of last summer. We see Dr. Larry Witmer’s lab in Ohio, and how we use CT scanners and 3D visualization software to learn more about the anatomy of dinosaurs. We see great footage of komodo dragons in Indonesia and lions and ostriches in South Africa, showing how we use extant animals as analogues for behaviour in extinct ones. We even get to see an ostrich leg dissected to examine the muscles. There’s discussion of ontogeny and allometry, taphonomy, and the great variety of social behaviours in extant animals. We also see dissenting opinions from scientists like Dr. David Eberth and Dr. Don Henderson, both from the Tyrrell. That’s a lot of fairly sophisticated concepts to deliver in a Discovery Channel special.

Brian Switek of Dinosaur Tracking has criticized the documentary for making overly bombastic claims that are as yet unsupported in the scientific literature. I think part of this stems from the fact that most people do not know that tyrannosaur is not synonymous with Tyrannosaurus, and unfortunately the documentary does not do a great job explaining that there are several species of tyrannosaurs presented in the film. In addition, I see some problems with the emphasis on the Mongolian finds. The documentary discusses at great length the large number of Tarbosaurus skeletons that have been found, and although they discuss the taphonomy of the Nemegt Formation at Bugin Tsav, there does seem to be some conflation with the Albertosaurus bonebed at Dry Island. The Albertosaurus bonebed is a true bonebed, containing more than 20 individuals in a relatively small area. In contrast, the Tarbosaurus skeletons at Bugin Tsav are generally separated from each other by some distance and do not really form any bonebeds (unless there have been some recent finds which I have not heard about). I was actually kind of disappointed that there was not more evidence on the Dry Island bonebed, which has been excavated extensively by Dr. Currie and formed the basis of a special volume in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences last fall. There are certainly a great number of Tarbosaurus known from Mongolia, and the unusually high ratio of Tarbosaurus to other dinosaurs in the Nemegt Formation is an area of active research. But to me, there is less evidence for sociality preserved in the Nemegt specimens than at the Dry Island bonebed. I suspect the emphasis on Mongolia over Alberta in the documentary is because of the more exotic setting offered by the Gobi Desert.

And that brings me to perhaps a less obvious but equally frustrating aspect of the documentary. I have written before about the absence of female palaeontologists in the popular media (and sadly, Dino Gangs is no exception to this), but also true is the absence of non-Caucasians in many documentaries. All of the Mongolian footage was shot during the Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Project’s recent expeditions, but Dr. Yuong-Nam Lee, the leader of the expedition, does not receive any name credit even though he appears on screen frequently. Nor is he featured in any of the interviews. I was particularly surprised by the description of the Gobi Desert, which is apparently “completely isolated from the outside world” and is “such a hostile environment that not even the local tribespeople can survive there”. The Gobi is rugged and relatively unpopulated, but to say these things overly romanticizes Mongolia. The Mongolians who continue to live the nomadic lifestyle certainly live very different daily lives than those of us in North America, but to use the word ‘tribespeople’ makes them sound primitive. Nearly every traditional ger that we passed had several dirtbikes, a satellite dish, and solar panels in addition to the horses, goats, and camels hanging around.

A final quibble: there was far too much reusing of animation from Clash of the Dinosaurs, Dinosaur Planet, and even When Dinosaurs Roamed America. Two abelisaurs, which are NOT known from Mongolia, were featured during a discussion of Tarbosaurus, Triceratops was presented as Protoceratops, and Parasaurolophus and ?Maiasaura stood in for Mongolian hadrosaurs. I know animation is expensive, but perhaps a nice illustration would do instead? For people interested in dinosaurs, it’s really, really jarring to see Triceratops, the last of the ceratopsians, presented as Protoceratops, one of the earliest.

In the end though, I liked Dino Gangs. I think the focus on the single question “were tyrannosaurs pack hunters?” was a real strong point for the documentary, since in essence this is what we do in science. We ask a question and then try to answer it. It was really nice to see this question explored in depth using many different lines of evidence, including counter arguments from dissenting voices. The Gobi desert looked great on film, and it was awesome to see Brian Cooley’s sculptures of Albertosaurus in the Cretaceous Alberta gallery at the Tyrrell get so much screen time. I would definitely be interested in hearing what non-palaeontologists took away from Dino Gangs.

Another new Korean dinosaur!

I'm happy to announce the publication of another new Korean dinosaur, Koreaceratops, by my friends and colleagues Yuong-Nam Lee, Michael Ryan, and Yoshi Kobayashi.




This little fellow was actually discovered very close to where I spent much of my summer this year, at Jeongok Harbour in Hwaseong-si (somewhat close to Jebu-do). Koreaceratops is diagnosed by some features of the ankle as well as the tall, deep tail. It's a beautiful specimen even though it lacks a skull - here's hoping that a head is found sometime!

The Dinosaur Egg Visitor Centre in Songsan has a nice model of a protoceratopsian with eggs and hatchlings, which I suppose we can now call Koreaceratops! There's also a bit of information on the specimen, although the actual fossils are not on display. You can, however, take a look at some fossil eggs both in the centre and a short walk away in situ.

I also wanted to post some pictures of the other Korean dinosaur named a few weeks ago, Koreanosaurus. I love the life reconstruction that was made for this guy!

http://hanopolis.com/?articleNo=52001&/story/Korea-gets-its-own-dinosaur

Koreanosaurus, a new basal ornithopod from Korea

After spending two months in Korea this summer I can't miss mentioning the following paper:

HUH, M., LEE, D.-G., KIM, J.-K., LIM, J.-D. & GODEFROIT, P. (2010): A new basal ornithopod dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of South Korea. – N. Jb. Geol. Paläont. Abh., DOI: 10.1127/0077-7749/2010/0102; Stuttgart.

Abstract: The Seonso Conglomerate (?Santonian – Campanian, Late Cretacous) of Boseong site 5 (southern coast of Korean Peninsula) has yielded well-preserved postcranial material belonging to a new taxon of ornithischian dinosaur, Koreanosaurus boseongensis nov. gen., nov. sp. This dinosaur is characterized by elongated neck vertebrae, very long and massive scapulocoracoid and humerus, proportionally short hindlimbs with a low hindlimb ratio for tibia/femur, and anteroposteriorly-elongated femoral head forming an obtuse 135° angle with the femoral shaft. Koreanosaurus displays a series of neornithischian synapomorphies. Amongst Neornithischia, most features of the postcranial skeleton suggest affinities with basal ornithopods and, amongst them, particularly with a small clade formed by three genera from the Cretaceous of Montana: Zephyrosaurus schaffi, Orodromeus makelai, and Oryctodromeus cubicularis. According to the morphological, phylogenetic, sedimentological, and taphonomic data at hand, it is tentatively postulated that Koreanosaurus was a burrowing dinosaur, like Oryctodromeus.

Good-bye Songsan.

I’m very sad to say that today is my last day in Korea. The last seven weeks have been truly wonderful and I will have many fond memories of my stay in Songsan. I’ve eaten some excellent food and some very strange food, seen wonderful sights, and got to prepare some really great ankylosaur fossils at the lab. Robin and Scott and I have had a great time.

I’m so grateful for all of the people who have helped me out for the last two months – Dr. Lee for hosting me on this research abroad visit, Yun for all of his help at the lab and around town, and Choon-Hyung, Pak-Jin, and Jin-Young for their patience at my lack of Korean and their excellent lunchtime cooking!

Tomorrow Robin returns to Canada and Scott and I head off to Beijing for two weeks of research and the Flugsaurier Symposium. Stay tuned for more updates!

Happy Suwon

Before we headed to the Korean Folk Village we had a bit of a stroll around the streets near the Suwon train station. There is a great pedestrian street with lots of interesting shops and restaurants.



I loved the jumble of signs! Although it was quiet in the morning, by the time we returned for dinner it was bustling with lots and lots of people.



The sign says “bee-eh kae-been” – beer cabin. Moose! Feels like home?

For dinner we ate at a Japanese-Korean fusion restaurant and had some very tasty chicken and seafood dishes. As appetizers, however, we got a bowl of interesting looking pine-cone-like things...silkworm larvae! Presumably this is a byproduct of the silk-getting (silking? Seriously, what do you call it?) process. They were cooked, and not squishy but not exactly crunchy. It took me a long time to decide to eat it. They tasted like Zojig’s canned crickets smell. I will probably not partake of the cooked silkworm larvae again.

Korean Folk Village, part 3: in which there is general silliness

For an extra 3000 won (about $3) you could go in the Korean haunted house! Spooky! It was just about the best 3000 won I’ve ever spent. Winding through dark corridors you would occasionally set off a blacklight-lit scene with little animatronics. Spooky characters included a bat eating a person, giant Arthropleura-like centipedes, someone getting pounded to death in a grain mill, and a snake coiling around a person. There were frequent appearances by a monster with a red face and a horn coming out of its forehead – presumably a monster from Korean folklore?

A popular Korean historical drama was filmed at the village, and there are costumes to try on for photos. I figure the hat fits pretty well.



Robin liked the Korean hats! (They were hot and strange.)

Scattered around the grounds were recreation pavilions with musical instruments and board games. There were also these really strange wicker tubes that you were supposed to lie down and hug. Very strange!

Korean Folk Village, part 2: in which there are flora and fauna

A traditional folk painting in Korea includes a tiger, a magpie, and a pine tree, and is called a jakhodo. The pine tree is a symbol of the first month of the year, the tiger has power to chase away evil spirits, and magpies were good omens that brought good news. I like these very much!

One of the very best things we saw at the Korean Folk Village was the process for getting silk from silkworms! I never had a very good idea of this process, and it was really neat to see how it was done in the old days. The silkworm caterpillars are allowed to create their cocoons, and then the pupae are put into boiling water. A few strands are caught from 5-10 pupae, and then wound up onto a rotating wheel. It was really fascinating but also kind of gross, because the pupae bob around in the water in a very disturbing way.

We were also quite delighted by these amazing red, black and white beetles. They could really jump! Any bug people out there have any idea what kind of beetle we saw? (His head is towards the top of the picture.)

Korean Folk Village, part 1: in which there is edutainment

Last Saturday we headed in to Suwon to visit the Korean Folk Village. I would highly recommend making the trip in to Suwon if you’re ever visiting Seoul or other nearby cities in Korea. The village is a reconstruction of many different styles and types of Korean buildings – scholar’s homes, temples, palaces, governor’s mansions, or the farmer’s thatched roof cottage (THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES!) shown here. There are so many interactive elements to the whole place - you can learn to make paper, straw sandals, and pottery, or you can try your hand at farm machinery, try catching a mudloach, wear traditional clothes, sit in a palanquin, and tons of other little activities. The three of us learned a lot about traditional Korean culture, AND had a lot of fun – true edutainment. The whole place is a little bit like Fortress Louisbourg in Cape Breton, or Fort Edmonton Park.

Robin and I wrote wishes on little pieces of paper and tied them to the strings on this rock pile. I wished for good specimens during my Gobi fieldwork in August. Robin wished for something lame like health and happiness for her family...



There appeared to be a working Buddhist temple set a little ways off the main paths. Up many sets of stairs and gardens was a beautiful building with this gold Buddha and fruit offerings.

One of my favourite things we saw on Saturday was a traditional farmer’s drum and dance performance. Several of the men were wearing these amazing streamer hats. The sticks on the back of the hats can swing around freely in a circle, and attached to the end is a streamer. By flicking their heads in different directions, the dancers could produce amazing streamer patterns that were completely amazing to watch.

Jebudo

We went to the beach this weekend!

The beaches are found on Jebudo, or Jebu Island, a short bus ride from Songsan. We had a wonderful afternoon looking for shells, admiring the scenery, and getting sunburnt.

There were some very nice rock formations, and apparently some hawks like to nest on the rocks behind me. At high tide you cannot drive on or off of the island, because the causeway becomes flooded (the “Miracle of Moses” as folks like to call it here).

I realize the last few posts have been a bit dinosaur-light, but luckily we were able to find this excellent specimen of Euoplocephalus with armour in situ.


And Scott found a very nice Centrosaurus!

I also kind of childishly insisted on having dinner in the boat restaurant...

Korean Food Adventures, part whatever the part it is now.

I realize a lot of the food posts probably make it seem like the cuisine over here is all live octopi and anglerfish and things that are very unusual to the North American palate. While everything is certainly different, not all dishes are as extravagantly odd. Hushik nangmyeon are cold dessert noodles that I have heard are very common snacks in the summertime. There are really thin noodles, cucumbers, radishes, melons, half of a hardboiled egg, and sesame seeds. It is quite tasty and certainly nice at the end of the meal!



The noodles can be challenging to eat, however. Too slippery!

Ok, I need to include one more extravagantly odd dish. Can you guess what the spicy meat on the grill is? Hint: it’s not squid, as we initially thought....

...it’s pig intestines!

Taking the Seoul Train, part 2

During our visit to Seoul we also visited the National Folk Museum, which was quite interesting. They have a series of Saturday traditional dance and music performances, and we were treated to a wonderful group of traditional dancers. My favourite number involved dancing with hourglass-shaped drums.


Magpies are good luck in Korea!



These are jangseung, Korean totem poles or tikis. They usually stand at the entrance to a town or village to ward off daemons and mark village boundaries.


Acupuncture dolls!



These are stone scholars that would have marked graves of important people.

Some of the stone figures had very strange faces!

Taking the Seoul Train, part 1

Scott and I trekked in to Seoul on Saturday and visited Gyeonbok Palace. The palace was founded in the 14th century, during the Joseon Dyanasty. It was a monsoon day in Korea but that meant the crowds were pretty thin and we had a great day.

There are 36 stone figures around the main hall, Geungjeong-jeon. One of my favourites was this turtle monster, called a dusky warrior turtle. Perhaps an inspiration for Gamera?




There were many excellent statues around the grounds.



Scott says hello to a new friend.



This is the garden behind Gyotae-jeon, the Queen’s residence. The chimneys have various symbolic animals on them. We learned that cranes and turtles represent longevity, butterflies and flowers represent fertility, and, somewhat surprisingly, bats represent wealth.


This is Hyangwon-jeong, a garden for relaxation. We saw two ducklings slowly making their way across the tops of the lily pads here.