SVP Report 3: the Page Museum

For the final entry in this year's SVP recap, let's head over to the Page Museum, which showcases specimens collected right outside its front doors in the La Brea tar seeps.

So many specimens have been collected from the tar seeps that the museum has over 400 dire wolf skulls on display - out of more than 1500 in their collections! It makes for an impressive Wall of Stuff. I am envious of their actual non-negligible sample size!

A dire wolf skeleton with a baculum! Now there's something you don't see every day!

I love surprises in museums! I'm used to seeing Panthera atrox, the large cat skeleton in this photo, labeled as the American lion, but here it was called Naegele's giant jaguar! Turns out there's been some back-and-forth about whether or not Panthera atrox is more lion-like or more jaguar-like; recent research seems to put it in the lion lineage. Whether or not the cat is a lion or a jaguar has some interesting biogeographical implications! P. atrox is a relatively rare component of the La Brea deposits compared to dire wolves and sabercats.

Giant not-condor says hi! HI TERATORNIS!

I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but man, ground sloth feet are weird.

In addition to all of the lovely large skeletal mounts, there's a very nice wall showcasing some of the smaller fossils, and things like taphonomy and pathology. Here's a cool example of rodent gnaw marks on a bone!

And here are the fused foot bones of a Smilodon! Ouch! 

There's a really excellent fishbowl lab - nobody working there when I visited, since it was a Sunday, but it looks like a pretty busy place with lots on the go!

I also liked how they made it so you could see into the collections area!

Finally, I'll end with this adorably retro display on the process of cataloguing and curating fossils (which I am totally happy to see in a museum exhibit)...featuring punch cards.

Velociraptor-free, mostly...

For the last several years, our lab has run a volunteer fossil prep program on weekday evenings. As the school year starts again, I thought I'd share our recruitment poster for this year!

We are very fortunate to have two prep labs in the BioSci building at the University of Alberta. Our basement lab handles the larger, more complex specimens like skulls or partial skeletons. The fourth floor lab, shown here, is where volunteers help us get through the enormous quantity of smaller fossils we've collected. There's lots of table space and light, and with volunteers it becomes quite sociable in the evenings!

There's always at least one grad student or upper-year undergrad present who supervises the volunteers and teaches them prep techniques. Volunteers have come from many different departments at the U of A, not just the sciences! We also get the occasional volunteers from outside the university, who hear about us online or via posters we put up around town.

Volunteers help us prepare a wide variety of material from all over Alberta, including theropods, hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, crocs, turtles, and champsosaurs. A lot of the small material comes from Dinosaur Provincial Park and is fairly easy to prep (sometimes just require a good toothbrushing and some glue!), but we also have more challenging projects like specimens from our Wapiti River Pachyrhinosaurus bonebed in Grande Prairie. We also have material collected way back in 1921 that has never been prepared!

The beginning of the school year is always exciting and I hope we'll see a bunch of new and returning volunteers in the next few weeks. If you're interested in keeping up with the goings on in our lab, you can follow us on our Facebook page, Dino Lab at the University of Alberta.

Hugo's Boss

I almost forgot to mention a fun bit of news coverage that happened during our Grande Prairie fieldwork. The first Pachyrhinosaurus skull to be prepared from the Wapiti River bonebed was nicknamed Hugo (for I hope obvious reasons...). It is on loan to the Grande Prairie Regional College for the next few months and is on display in a case beside their bookstore. The Grande Prairie Daily Herald-Tribune did a nice little piece on the new display and features a completely awesome photo of Phil Currie and prep technician Susan Kagan.

Susan has been pummeling her way through the hard ironstone nodules that enclose the Wapiti River skulls - here is a photo from last fall of progress on the next skull to be prepared. It's come a long way since then, but it takes a long time to get these guys ready.

Grande Prairie Regional College also has a full skeletal mount of Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, the species known from the Pipestone Creek bonebed.

Ok, that should actually be the end of Pachyrhinosaurus updates for the next little while...

Pelvis Progress

Perhaps black fuzzy sneakers were not the wisest choice for this sort of work...

The pelvis is beginning to take shape today. The surrounding rock comes away cleanly from the bone (what we call ‘good separation’), which makes for pretty fast work. Things slow down a bit when I hit weathered, flaky bone – because the bones have not been heavily mineralized, if the hard outer layer of bone (the cortex) comes off, the inner spongy bone can easily turn into powder. When I hit eroded areas, I must slow down and douse the spongy parts in a special glue called Vinac, which is mostly just plastic that dissolves in acetone.

Ankylosaur hips look pretty weird even for dinosaurs, so here’s a picture of a perfect complete specimen at the American Museum of Natural History. This pelvis belongs to a Euoplocephalus from Alberta, and this specimen was very important for my work on ankylosaur tail swinging as it preserves really nice muscle scars that let me map out the tail-swinging muscles. Tail swinging math can be found here! (The blue line on the scale bar is 10 cm long – ankylosaurs were REALLY fat animals!)

In other news, a new shipment of fossils arrived today – the results of the 2009 field season in the Gobi.

Do you like puzzles?

Sometimes, even when you’ve made a good field jacket, bones get a bit beat up on the way from the field to the lab. I find this to be especially true of bones that have not been very mineralized, like many bones from the Gobi. If you’re careful, you can usually get a good amount of the bits back together, but it requires a lot of patience, especially as the pieces get smaller and smaller...

The pieces I’m gluing back together form parts of the ilia – the long bladelike parts of the pelvis. The brush and glue bottle above give you an idea of the size of the jacket. And the size of the bone bits. I took this photo shortly before my eyes crossed and I gave up for the day - this will be an ongoing project for slow times over the next few weeks. The main parts of the bones have been stabilized so now I can continue removing loose rubble.


A few people have asked me what the outside of the lab and visitor centre looks like, so here you go. The public part of the building is located in the round section at the front – the ground level has displays and posters, and the upper level has the small theatre and patio. As an aside, I caught a bit of the movie that they show in the theatre – a pretty nice computer animation that tells the story of Protoceratops and how the eggs and nests were preserved. The prep lab is found in the section behind the public area, the big flat glass windows under the looming dinosaur. Behind that is unprepared storage on the ground floor, and offices and collections on the second floor.

And, although I do not have a photo of this, today I saw my first dog available as food. There is an open air market every few days near the motel I’m staying at, and today there was a great big pot o’ dog halves. I thought it was pork at first. I was incorrect. I am intrigued but slightly hesitant to try it myself...

Starting in on the skeleton.

The Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Project has been collecting fossils from the Gobi Desert for the past several summers, and some of the specimens are housed in the lab in Hwaseong. My visit to Korea is funded through an NSERC Foreign Study Supplement, which is kind of like a study abroad for scientists. The purpose of my visit here is to help prepare a large ankylosaur skeleton, and to get experience working in a different culture and research environment.


This is just one of at least three large field jackets for this specimen – I definitely won’t complete the entire skeleton during this visit, but I hope to make a significant dent in it. (Well, not literally.) Here’s what it looked like when we opened it up – mostly a lot of rock rubble which I have spent the last two days picking through and throwing away, once I’m sure there’s no bone in it. There have been lots of loose fragments of ribs and vertebral processes, and part of what I think is the ilium is showing on one side. The rock is a buff sandstone that is very loosely consolidated in most places, so I think I should be able to make good progress with the airscribe when I get past the rubble.

A nice surprise was a loose block in the rubble that had this dorsal vertebra partly showing. This took about 4 hours to clean up. Separation between the rock and bone is pretty good, and most of the rock just kind of pops off. The vertebra had obviously undergone some erosion prior to burial based on the broken surfaces that were completely enclosed by matrix (indicating that this was not damage caused since being recently exposed). Gobi bones have very different colours compared to the Alberta bones I’m accustomed to – where Dinosaur Park bones are a nice rich brown, and Edmonton and Grande Prairie bones are grey and black, Gobi bones are white, yellow, red and purple.

Hwaseong prep work, day 3

Here’s an example of one of the dinosaur nests found nearby. I like how they show the matrix surrounding the nest.

This charming pooch lives at the dinosaur centre – everyone seems to have a different name for her, like “Dino-Girl” or “Yellow Fur”.

At the end of day 2, a lot of progress had been made on the tail club, and lots of matrix had been removed.

Here’s how it was looking at the end of day 3. It actually looks like a tail club now (well, half of a tail club, at least). The surface texture makes for fiddly prep work. This probably needs another morning and then it should be all done.

First day at the Hwaseong Dinosaur Lab

After a long journey to Seoul, I have arrived in Hwaseong-si. Here’s a few pictures from my first day at the lab.

I have begun to prepare a tail club.

The lab is spacious and bright, and visitors to the centre can look in on what we’re up to.



In the visitor’s centre, there are displays highlighting the fossil finds from Hwaseong. Many eggs and nests have been recovered from a Protoceratops-like dinosaur.

On the second floor you can step onto a balcony and take in the view. The lab is located in a marshy area. On the drive in there are lots of farms and rice paddies.




The second floor also has a very cute little theatre with an amazing mural. The opposite wall has information about the Korea Mongolia International Dinosaur Project’s fieldwork.



More to come soon!