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.

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...

Pipestone Creek Bonebed

The area around Grande Prairie is rich with dinosaur fossils, although the setting is somewhat different than you might expect if you're used to working in badlands like Dinosaur Provincial Park. In Grande Prairie, the only badlands outcrops are the Kleskun Hills, and most other sites are found along creeks and river valleys. I spent the bulk of my time at the Wapiti River bonebed, but helped out a little bit at the concurrent excavation at Pipestone Creek.

The Wapiti River bonebed has yet to be described, but Pipestone Creek is a fairly famous locality because of the huge numbers of Pachyrhinosaurus that were collected there during the late 80s by the Royal Tyrrell Museum and featured in the touring exhibition Dinosaur World Tour: The Greatest Show Unearthed. This bonebed was reopened last year as plans for the new museum to be built in the area began to solidify. In 2008 the animals in this quarry were separated from Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis (found in southern Alberta), and named Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai after Al Lakusta who discovered the bonebed.

Although material from the Wapiti River and Pipestone Creek bonebeds are currently accessioned at the University of Alberta, we've had a lot of help from the Grande Prairie Regional College, who have helped with many of the logistics of working in the area and allow us to stay at their dorms (it sure is nice to have kitchens, showers, and proper beds).  Here's a few photos from the last days of this year's fieldwork at Pipestone Creek.

 

The Pipestone Creek bonebed is incredibly dense, and I've been told that upwards of 100 bones have been found in a single square meter here. We were particularly excited this year because a very fine P. lakustai skull was uncovered, which you can see here as the large jacket. We had to jacket a bunch of smaller bones along with it because they sit partially underneath the skull and could not be removed. They'll be extracted back at the lab.

Here the skull has been flipped and the crew jackets the underside in preparation for transport. Pipestone Creek is a much easier site to access than Wapiti River. As you can see, the bonebed is not far above the creek, and a road has been constructed to allow visitors an easy walk to the site.

Helicopters are essential for getting large-ish jackets out of the Wapiti River bonebed, since the hill is too steep and high to easily get large jackets up to the edge and into the truck, or down to the river and into jetboats. This year, the helicopter was also a much needed tool for getting the large skull jacket out of Pipestone Creek. Here it sits in a field at the campground after three successful lifts.

We were a little apprehensive about getting the large skull into the truck, but luckily a crane was in the area and happy to help us out. The driver weighed the jacket - it came out at a whopping 1200 lbs! Too bad we didn't have a crane for getting it out of the truck once we were back at the university...

 

I'll probably have more updates as some of this material is prepared at the U of A, but that concludes my Grande Prairie fieldwork for this year. You can keep up to date with the goings on up there by keeping an eye on the museum project, formerly called the River of Death and Discovery Dinosaur Museum and recently been renamed the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum. They have a pretty nifty new website (and blog, which you can find on the blogroll here).

Wapiti River Fieldwork, part 2

Here's a few more shots from the University of Alberta's fieldwork at the Wapiti River bonebed near Grande Prairie. Fieldwork wrapped up on Friday and the fossils are now at the U of A awaiting preparation.

It continues to amaze me just how much we have cleared out of this ledge over the last five years - when we started, the ledge did not exist.

I've learned that different field crews use different methods for mapping quarries. At the U of A, we use a baseline, grid square, plumb-bob and gridded paper to mark the location and orientation of bones in the quarry. (Sometimes it gets a little crowded, but people's heads make good supports for the grid square.) The grid square is a square meter, divided into 10x10 cm quadrants. The baseline is marked at 1 m increments along its length, and the grid square is lined up at the relevant marks. If the grid square is very high above the elements you want to map, a plumb-bob is useful for reducing parallax error. Each bone is marked with quarry coordinates, and eventually all of the map sheets are combined in photoshop or illustrator. The maps will help us to understand the taphonomy of the site.

We almost never find teeth at this site, but this year we recovered 2 or 3 ceratopsian teeth and 2 or 3 tyrannosaurid teeth. Here's one of the ceratopsian teeth, which you can see as a small triangle in the middle of the orange splotch.

Here's a Pachyrhinosaurus skull we helicoptered out on the second last day. It may not look like much, but I think this is one of the nicer ones we've gotten out of this quarry. You can see a large circle to the left that is probably the orbit. Because the block is already broken into smaller nodules, we jacketed the skull as multiple blocks to make arranging for the helicopter nets a little bit easier. The edges of all of the separate nodules were marked before jacketing so we can piece everything back together in the lab.

Wapiti River fieldwork, part 1

Hi everyone! It's been a while since my last post as I catch up on research and get ready for a brief stint of fieldwork in Grande Prairie. I've been working at the Wapiti River bonebed for the last few days, where we are excavating a Pachyrhinosaurus bonebed. Here is a quick update of what we've been up to.

The bonebed is on a steep river side, and we have cut a long but narrow ledge into the cliff. The view is quite spectacular and we occasionally see deer and bears on the other side of the river. 

Ropes are helpful for getting up and down the steep cliff!

The bonebed includes two distinct preservational types - hard bones that separate well from twisty shaley mudstones, and hard, hard nodules containing mostly skull bones. You can see the skull nodules below Angelica, as she works in the mudstone layer.

It can be rather goopy in the quarry and the bones are often cracked with mud in between the pieces, so we often map the bone and then remove it completely to clean and glue before we jacket for transport. The bones look quite good once they are clean and put back together! I am pointing at a skull element I found on my first day here.

More to come soon!

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.

Stegoceras is everywhere!

And by everywhere, I mean in two PLoS ONE papers this week. (But that's pretty good!) Stegoceras is the focus of a study on cranial ontogeny in pachycephalosaur skulls, and in head-butting in pachycephalosaurs and artiodactyls.

I've always thought of Stegoceras as an unofficial mascot for dinosaur palaeontology at the University of Alberta. The best Stegoceras skeleton ever collected is UALVP 2 (that's right, 2! 1 UALVP 1 is a turtle), shown here on display in our museum in the Earth Sciences Building. The actual recovered bones are displayed below the mounted skeleton. It's a beautiful skull, and pachycephalosaur postcranial material is extremely rare. 

Stegoceras makes an appearance at lots of museums all over North America. Before this corner of the Royal Tyrrell Museum was converted into the new ceratopsian exhibit, it featured a diorama including a fleshed out Albertosaurus, Edmontonia, and Stegoceras.

You can still see these two Stegoceras skeletons at the Tyrrell.

I even saw the UALVP 2 Stegoceras skull at the Smithsonian last May - can you spot him in this who's who of pachycephalosaurs?

Read all about Stegoceras in these new papers:

Schott RK, Evans DC, Goodwin MB, Horner JR, Brown CM, Longrich NR. 2011. Cranial ontogeny in Stegoceras validum (Dinosauria: Pachycephalosauria): a quantitative model of pachycephalosaur dome growth and variation. PLoS ONE 6(6): e21092.

Snively E, Theodor JM. 2011. Common functional correlates of head-strike behavior in the pachycephalosaur Stegoceras validum (Ornithischia, Dinosauria) and combative artiodactyls. PLoS ONE 6(6): e21422.