Wading With Dinosaurs

It's that time of year again! Time to talk palaeontology with a 1000 of my closest friends in a convention centre somewhere far, far away! That's right, it's the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, this time in Dallas, Texas. This year I tried out an SVP meeting field trip for the first time. We chased dinosaurs and their friends through the mid Cretaceous near Dallas!

First stop - Jones Ranch

While the morning was still cool, we ventured out to the Jones Ranch quarry, where the remains of several Sauroposeidon were excavated. Originally called Paluxysaurus, these bones belonged to several large sauropods from the Twin Mountains Formation, which is about 113 million years old or so. I was pretty impressed by the size of the quarry - I'm standing maybe 5 feet in front of one of the quarry walls, and looking towards the other.

Second stop - Dinosaur Valley State Park and the Paluxy River/Glen Rose trackways!

Dinosaur Valley State Park is one of those iconic dinosaur places that I'm sure is on many palaeontologist's bucket lists. If you've visited the American Museum of Natural History, you will probably have seen some of the trackways cut out of this very river - a piece of the tracksite was taken back to New York for display and hangs out underneath the Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus? Now I forget which specimens are which!). 

 The trackways are in the Albian aged Glen Rose Formation, and the rocks represent a lagoon or shallow marine environment. I guess dinosaurs liked the occasional day at the beach, as well! There are two kinds of trackmakers here, and here's one of them - a large theropod, probably something like Acrocanthosaurus.

And here's the other trackmaker, a large sauropod, possibly something like Sauroposeidon. In case that one is hard to make out, the hind foot print is about a foot to the left of that person's shoe, and is the large smooth depression with a series of vertical shadows at the front - those are the claw marks from a sauropod's hind foot. The front feet made totally different tracks, which look kind of like crescents or half-moons.

Intrepid field trip leader James Farlow heads into the river to sweep of a larger track surface. Most of the trackways are submerged, and you can see some of them in the foreground in this picture - look for the alternating big teardrop or circle shapes!

Most of us waded in and took turns sweeping slime out of the footprints and standing in them. 

The cool water felt pretty good on a hot Texas afternoon!

 

And this post wouldn't be complete without mentioning the great opportunity to see a different era of palaeontological history, in the form of original Sinclair World's Fair dinosaur statues!

Third stop - Arlington Archosaur Site

The Arlington Archosaur Site is a huge quarry in the Cenomanian Woodbine Formation that is located in an active housing development site - pretty soon, this will be part of some lucky people's backyards! It's a neat parallel to the Danek Bonebed in Edmonton, which is also located right within the city. Many volunteers have contributed thousands of hours to help excavate the remains of crocodilians, the early hadrosaur Protohadros, and more. This site has only been worked for a few years, so expect lots of discoveries and publications to come. Find some ankylosaurs, guys!

 The AAS volunteers had cold beverages and dinosaur trackway cookies waiting for us! Y'all are too nice. What a great way to end the day.

Many many thanks to the field trip leaders Chris Noto, Thomas Adams, and James Farlow for taking us on this romp through the mid Cretaceous - it was a great mix of classic sites and new discoveries, and a great start to the conference!

SVP Report 1: Natural History Museum of LA County

The Natural History Museum of LA County is excellent! I had a chance to visit it during the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting in Los Angeles the week before last. A great museum with some wonderful dinosaur exhibits. Here's a sampling!

Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops face off in the eternal battle of good vs. evil...

Triceratops puts its best foot forward.

Wall of Stuff! Can you identify all of the bones here?

Fruitadens protests the fact that it stands no taller than the hand of a sauropod. Always nice to see heterodontosaurids on display!

Thescelosaurus looks majestic, for once! (I kid, I kid, I love Thescelosaurus. But this is a particularly nice skeletal mount.)

I thought this was a pretty neat display of tracks and their trackmakers! Here's a hadrosaur foot and a hadrosaur footprint.

The centrepiece of the dinosaur galleries must be the Tyrannosaurus trio - juvenile, subadult, and adult - feeding on a carcass. There's a nice display to the side (but behind this photo) showing the preserved elements used to reconstruct the three skulls.

The dinosaurs are split into two galleries, and each has an upper level, allowing for multiple angles of specimen viewing. In this shot you can see Carnotaurus in the foreground, the three tyrannosaurs in the middle, and towards the back are Allosaurus and Stegosaurus.

Juvenile Edmontosaurus skeleton! So cool!

A display case discussing the origin of birds has this Velociraptor skeletal mount...

And a 3D reconstruction of Archaeopteryx! Stripped of its feathers, it really does show off its dinosaurian features.

And a non-dinosaur to wrap things up: I really enjoyed seeing this life-size reconstruction of the Mesozoic marsupial Didelphodon. It really emphasizes just how big some of the Mesozoic mammals could get - the skull is about the size of a opossum or skunk skull.

Next time: The Page Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits!

Back to the RBCM

I had the nicest commute to work yesterday morning.

A brisk jaunt over the Rocky Mountains, then a smooth descent into this fluffy loveliness.

And here's what I found on the other side of those clouds!

Yes, I was back at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, BC, to return the holotype of Gwawinapterus to British Columbia. I do not know if there are plans to display the specimen, but there is currently an excellent 'Behind the Scenes' exhibit with a great display from the Palaeontology Department featuring other specimens from Hornby Island (the Gwawinapterus locality), north-central BC, and more.

During my last visit I was able to snap this nice cast of a segment of trackway from the Lower Cretaceous Gething Formation of Peace River Canyon. These are on display outside the museum, sort of near the main entrance. This was one of Phil Currie's first major projects after being hired at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now the Royal Alberta Museum). The trackways in this area were originally collected by CM Sternberg in the 1930s, and subsequently by the Royal Ontario Museum in 1965. With the construction of the WAC Bennett Dam (which would eventually fill to form Williston Lake), an extended expedition was organized by the Provincial Museum of Alberta, and the tracksite was visited from 1976-1979. More than 1700 footprints were documented during these expeditions, and at least 100 trackways were identified. The photo above shows the foot and handprints of a hadrosaur, but theropod, ankylosaur, and even bird footprints are known from the Gething Formation.

 
 
You can read more about the Peace River Canyon tracks here (free PDF!):
 
Currie PJ. 1983. Hadrosaur trackways from the Lower Cretaceous of Canada. Acta Palaeontological Polonica 28:63-73.



Mamma mia, è un dinosauro!

It is Christmastime, which means it is time for me to make my annual pilgrimage to my favourite 13th-Century-Castle-that-is-also-a-Palaeontological-Museum in lovely Lerici, Italy.

Enter the Cortile dei Dinosauri to meet some friends from the Jurassic and Triassic.

A family of cynodonts relaxes on the sand.

Scutosaurus gives you the once over.

And my small thyreophoran friend Scutellosaurus steps hesitantly behind a sauropod.

The interior of the museum is also quite nice, and features many footprints from the area around Lerici. There's also a pretty nice selection of invertebrate fossils from around the world.

I feel strongly that I need to make this into a t-shirt.

You can read more about the dinosaurs of Italy in the book...the Dinosaurs of Italy, by Cristiano Dal Sasso. It is a very readable book geared to a lay audience and has wonderful information about Ciro, the remarkably well-preserved small theropod Scipionyx, and Antonio, the newly-named hadrosaur Tethyshadros.

Dal Sasso C, Signore M. 1998. Exceptional soft-tissue preservation in a theropod dinosaur from Italy. Nature 392: 383-387.

Dalla Vecchia FM. 2009. Tethyshadros insularis, a new hadrosauroid dinosaur (Ornithischia) from the Upper Cretaceous of Italy. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29:1100-1116.

And for more information on dinosaur footprints from Lerici, check out:
Nicosia U and Loi M. 2003. Triassic footprints from Lerici (La Spezia, Northern Italy). Ichnos 10:127-140.