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.

A Return Visit to the Jurassic Forest

Last fall I visited the newly-opened Jurassic Forest and enjoyed it very much. However, because winter arrives early in Edmonton, the leaves had already fallen and the dinosaurs were quite snowy! Today I spent some time showing off ankylosaur fossils and casts with visitors at the forest, and had a chance to see the dinosaur trails in their summer greenery. Here's a few new photos from the forest!

Styracosaurus looks like it's in its natural environment.

I can't remember exactly which sauropod this is supposed to be, but I like the neck posture!

The Jurassic Forest also features a few non-dinosaurian friends, including several Pteranodon and this Dimetrodon. Right now, there are tadpoles in this marsh! (I've also heard a baby moose likes to visit the trails sometimes!)

A new addition this summer is Spinosaurus.

Jurassic Forest has been hosting special presentations for the last few weeks, including talks on tyrannosaur tails by fellow grad student Scott Persons, the dinosaurs of northwest Alberta by Robin Sissons and Kat Ormay (of GPRC), and presentations by Phil Currie and Jack Horner. You can keep track of their special events at this page or via their email newsletter.

Also, you can ride on this lovely Euoplocephalus! (He has a saddle, or else he'd be a bit spiky I think...)

The Ontario Science Centre

I’m back from a vacation to visit various family members scattered around the globe, including a stop in Toronto. It was time for a long overdue visit to the Ontario Science Centre, which I hadn’t visited since I was in my early teens, but which was one of my very favourite places when I was younger.

The Ontario Science Centre was built in 1969 and was a pretty revolutionary place at the time, as instead of the stereotypical ‘static’ museum displays pretty much everything was hands-on in some way. There are great exhibits on astronomy and the human body, an indoor rainforest with some really cool poison dart frogs, a fin whale skeleton, and the Science Arcade, which is probably one of the most fun science exhibits to play in.

The Human Body gallery includes a pickled elephant heart, smaller Arbour sibling for scale.

The only exhibit that I couldn’t make up my mind about was A Question of Truth, which purportedly attempts to examine bias in science. In essence, I like what this exhibit is trying to do – there are some good demonstrations of how unconscious biases about gender, race, and culture can affect your interpretations of various phenomena. For example, there was an excellent display about IQ tests that did a really great job showing just how subjective measures of intelligence can be. On the flip side, there were some really questionable ideas being thrown around, and a fair amount of support for woo in the form of ‘alternative medicine’. An example I’ll take from their website: “Compare different models of our Solar System and discovery that there’s more than one correct way to look at the skies...”. No. It is ok to discuss the history of our interpretations of the solar system, and to explain why there were different theories, but to imply that there is more than one right answer is misleading.

And speaking of space, our favourite find at the centre was this incredible exhibit on cosmic rays. Cosmic rays striking the super-cooled alcohol vapour leave bright tracks like contrails. (Fun fact: the narrator is Canadian astronaut Julie Payette.) A minor criticism is that the cosmic ray exhibits, being set in a small room across from the planetarium, are not particularly well marked, and it takes a bit of hunting through the placards on the walls to actually figure out what you’re looking at. But what a reward when you do! I’ll admit that I watched this for far, far too long.

One thing I hadn’t realized was that J. Tuzo Wilson (of plate tectonics fame) was a director of the Ontario Science Centre. His contributions to geology are recognized outside the centre with an ‘immovable stake’ showing how much the North American plate has moved since he was born.

Even though there are no fossil exhibits at the Ontario Science Centre, there was a wall of dinosaur stuff in the gift shop. Did you know that ankylosaurs were the laziest of dinosaurs?

Poor ankylosaurs just can’t catch a break.