Seitaad rises from the sands of time

This new dinosaur gets my vote for one of the coolest names of 2010! In tomorrow’s (March 24th) issue of PLoS ONE the new sauropodomorph Seitaad ruessi will be unveiled [you can read it now here]! Seitaad is derived from Seit’aad, a sand-desert monster from the Navajo (Diné) creation legend that swallowed its victims in sand dunes. The skeleton of Seitaad was found encased in a Jurassic sand dune (Navajo Formation) in the Comb Ridge area near Bluff, Utah (pictured below). While tracks are relatively common fossils found in the Navajo Sandstone, Segisaurus, a small coelophysoid (thropod, meat eater) discovered in Arizona, is the only other dinosaur body fossils known from the Navajo Sandstone at this time (Camp 1936; Carrano et al. 2005[as far as I know]). The species name, ruessi, is derived from Everett Ruess, famous young artist, poet, historian, and explorer who disappeared in southern Utah in 1934, and subject on this blog in the past. The name Seitaad ruessi is pronounced SAY-eet-AWD ROO-ess-EYE. There is a great interview with Mark Loewen, one of the studies authors, over at the Open Source Paleontologist! Be sure to check it out for some great details!

Location of Seitaad find and reconstruction of animal.

The official press release:

New Dinosaur from Utah’s Red Rocks
Plant-Eater Named for Vanished Explorer Everett Ruess
March 23, 2010 – Utah’s red rocks – world-famous attractions at numerous national parks, monuments and state parks – have yielded a rare skeleton of a new species of plant-eating dinosaur that lived 185 million years ago and may have been buried alive by a collapsing sand dune. The discovery confirms the widespread success of sauropodomorph dinosaurs during the Early Jurassic Period.

Until now, Utah’s red rocks were known only for a few scattered bones and dinosaur footprints. However, discovery of a remarkably preserved partial skeleton is being published in the March 24 edition of PLoS ONE, the online open-access journal produced by the Public Library of Science.

The study was conducted by Joseph Sertich, a former University of Utah master’s student and current Stony Brook University Ph.D. student, and Mark Loewen (pictured to left), a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History and instructor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah.

The new dinosaur species is named Seitaad ruessi (SAY-eet-AWD ROO-ess-EYE), which is derived from the Navajo word, “Seit’aad,” a sand-desert monster from the Navajo (Diné) creation legend that swallowed its victims in sand dunes (the skeleton of Seitaad had been “swallowed” in a fossilized sand dune when it was discovered); and Ruess, after the artist, poet, naturalist and explorer Everett Ruess who mysteriously disappeared in the red rock country of southern Utah in 1934 at age 20.

Seitaad ruessi is part of a group of dinosaurs known as sauropodomorphs. Sauropodomorphs were distributed across the globe during the Early Jurassic, when all of the continents were still together in the supercontinent named Pangaea. Millions of years later, sauropodomorphs evolved into gigantic sauropods, long-necked plant eaters whose fossils are well known from elsewhere in Utah, including Dinosaur National Monument.

A Dinosaur Buried by the Dunes
The skeleton of Seitaad was discovered protruding from the multicolored cliffs of Navajo Sandstone in 2004 by local historian and artist, Joe Pachak, while hiking in the Comb Ridge area near Bluff, Utah. His discovery, located just below an ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) cliff-dwelling, was subsequently reported to the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Utah Museum of Natural History. Museum paleontologists and crews excavated and collected the specimen in 2005 (picture to right, (left to right) Mike Getty, Josh Smith and Joe Gentry).

The beautifully preserved specimen includes most bones of the skeleton, except for the head, and parts of the neck and tail. Seitaad was found in fossilized sand dunes that were part of a vast desert that covered the region nearly 185 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. Research suggests that the animal was buried in a suddenly collapsing sand dune that engulfed the remains and stood them on their head. The missing parts of the skeleton were lost to erosion over the past thousand years, but were almost certainly visible when Native Americans lived on the cliff just above the skeleton.

In life, the animal would have stood about 3 to 4 feet (about 1 meter) tall at the hips and was 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 meters) long. It would have weighed approximately 150 to 200 pounds (70 to 90 kilograms), and could walk on two or four legs. Like its later gigantic relatives, Seitaad most likely ate plants.

Early sauropodomorphs, including Seitaad, had long necks and tails with small heads and leaf-shaped teeth, suggesting that they were specialized for an herbivorous (plant-eating) diet. These same traits were carried on in their much larger descendents, the sauropods. “Although Seitaad was preserved in a sand dune, this ancient desert must have included wetter areas with enough plants to support these smaller dinosaurs and other animals,” said Sertich. “Just like in deserts today, life would have been difficult in Utah’s ancient ‘sand sea.’”

According to Loewen, “We know from geologic evidence that seasonal rainstorms like today’s summer monsoons provided much of the moisture in this sand sea, filling ponds and other low spots between the sand dunes.”

The closest relatives of Seitaad are known from similar-aged rocks in South America and southern Africa. Other, less complete, fossils from northern Arizona hinted at the presence of sauropodomorphs like Seitaad, but none were complete enough to understand exactly what species was living in the American Southwest. The discovery of Seitaad confirms that this group of dinosaurs was extremely widespread and successful during the Early Jurassic, approximately 175 million to 200 million years ago.

Although the Navajo Sandstone is exposed all over Utah and Arizona, fossils are extremely rare and we have not yet learned much about the animals that lived in this giant desert. Other animals that lived in the Navajo Sandstone were all relatively small animals, including a carnivorous dinosaur, crocodile relatives and proto-mammals called tritylodonts. Even though Seitaad was quite small, it was likely the largest herbivore during this time period in southern Utah. “This new find suggests that there may be more dinosaurs yet to be discovered in these rocks,” said Sertich.

References:

Camp, C. 1936. A new type of small bipedal dinosaur from the Navajo sandstone of Arizona. University of California Publications, Bulletin of the Department of Geological Sciences 24: 39-56.

Carrano, M.T, Hutchinson, J.R, and Sampson, S.D. 2005. New information on Segisaurus halli, a small theropod dinosaur from the Early Jurassic of Arizona. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 25(4): 835-849

Sertich, J.J.W. and Loewen, M.A. 2010. A New Basal Sauropodomorph Dinosaur from the Lower Jurassic Navajo Sandstone of Southern Utah. PLoS ONE 5(3): e9789. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009789


© ReBecca K. Hunt-Foster, all images from Mark Loewen and Sertich and Loewen 2010.

Summer Reading List Meme

I thought I would jump on board with the Summer Reading List Meme that has been going around this month. Suvrat started it, followed by BrianR, then Eric, Silver Fox, and ITV Brian. Rules are easy: What are you reading/planning to read this summer? This is my non technical list. I am way behind on my journal reading.

In no particular order:

• the Songlines - I recently finished this book (Sunday that is). It was a great read, if a bit slow in some parts. It is a book Jimmy Buffett really enjoyed and even sings about so I thought I would give it a go. It is a sort of ethnographic sketch, something I had not read much of since I took Anthropology as an undergrad. I really liked the underlying theme of threads tying a culture to its creation, heavy on nature. It is also nice just as a rambling, traveling tail.
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• the Namesake - I saw the movie and was interested in the perspective of a Indian family moving to the US and the way they approach it vs. that of their children who are born here. They take a trip with their children back to their native India, weaving a travel tale with a cultural experience. It also seems to be a book about understanding and accepting where you come from and how that can differ from the lives of your parents, relatives and friends, making you appreciate where they are coming from and why they are the way they are. Something I pay more attention to these days in my own life. I also heard the book was much better than the movie, which can be a good or bad thing.
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• Breakfast with Buddha -My sister-in-law got me this one for my birthday and, although I have not heard of it before, my husbands side of the family have had a good record of getting me books that I like, so I am looking forward to reading it (they got me Water for Elephants for Christmas which I read in Jan./Feb., and it was a really great read). It sounds interesting and involves a few themes I am always interested in: roadtrips and buddhism.
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• Fifty Years on the Old Frontier -I picked this book up while I was doing fieldwork in Nebraska a few weeks ago. We had gotten rained out of the field and took a short trip down to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. I had been there a few times before but this time the kid (he was only in high school!) who gave the interpretive talk before their short film on the history of the area gave a really good talk! It made me interested to find out more about James Cook, the pioneer, rancher, Native American advocate, and fossil enthusiast who lived at Agate Springs and first invited paleontologist to his ranch to study the Miocene fossils found there. There are also some interesting Native American interpretations of the fossils themselves.
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• Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty - I first heard about Ruess in April when I read about him in a National Geographic Adventure article (I guess I also read about him in the book Into the Wild, but I do not remember it). I had been wanting to read more about his adventures and wanderings, and found this book in the Arches National Park bookstore when I was in Moab last week helping with one of our five-day dinosaur digs the museum does. I am looking forward to learning more about him.
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• Cinema Southwest - This is another one of those book I have intended to buy for sometime. I have seen it in many of the bookstores in and around my neck of the woods, and just never picked it up. On the drive down to Moab last week John and I were debating about a film that John Wayne & Maureen O'Hara had shot in the canyon on highway 128 - we could not decided which movie it was (it was Rio Grande by the way), so we decided to just break down and buy it. Many movies have been filmed down here, especially around the Moab area, and we visit these areas enough that we thought it would be fun to know what we were talking about for once and that it would be interesting tidbits we could work into tours and impress our friends with our never ending amount of useless knowledge surrounding fluff like film. :)

So there is my random list. I must admit that one nice thing about not being in the hard core rat race of grad school is the fact that I actually have time to read books I enjoy! And it does not always have to involve paleontology or even science. Crazy concept, but it is actually rather nice and relaxing to still be able to do what I love but also slack off and read some fun fiction every now and then. It is kind of interesting now to look up at my list and realize there is a common thread of travel in these books. Odd, I wonder why ;)

© ReBecca K. Hunt-Foster

Where does the time go?

Hi everyone! Sorry for the overly long departure! I thought I would have time to do a few blog post when I returned from my vacation, but I left the day after returning home for nearly 2 weeks of field work (who can complain about that!). So I apologize for my week vacation from blogging turning into a 3 week MIA.

I am still getting caught up on things here at home and work, so I hope to get caught up with some new blog post very soon! Until then, I thought I would share a recent (non paleontology/geology related) story that I read while in the field.

In this months issue of National Georaphic Adventure they had a story about Everett Ruess. I had never hear of Ruess until I read Into the Wild where he is talked about for several pages, and had forgotten about the story until I read about it in the magazine this month. It is an interesting story about Ruess, who was a 20 year old Californian artist and writer who traveled around the American Southwest in the early 1930's. He disappeared in 1934 (last seen in Escalante, Utah) and no one ever knew what happen to him.

Enter the modern day: Daisy Johnson, a New Mexico Navajo native, told her brother, Denny Bellson, a story she had heard about their grandfather. Daisy had cancer and contacted a medicine man about the problem. The medicine man informed her that the cancer was because of something her grandfather (whom had also had cancer) had done in the 1930's. Their grandfather had seen a white man ridding though a canyon near his home and witnessed the murder of this man by Ute Indians. When he went to check on the man he found him dead, and rather than leaving him in the canyon, moved his body up to the side of the canyon for burial. Some time after when he got cancer the medicine man told him he would have to preform a ceremony to rid the man of his cancer, which involved revisiting the burial site. Their grandfather lived for another ten years. Now the family curse was visiting Daisy.

Could the white man their grandfather had seen be Everette Ruess? The site is investigated by archaeologist, forensic anthropologist, and even the FBI. Read the story here to find out the entire story - it is really an interesting read (and then read the recent press release about DNA results from the remains)!

Photo © National Geographic Adventure