The first Triceratops bonebed ...

Congrats to Josh Mathews on his first publication! And in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology of all places! Josh has worked with the Burpee Museum of Natural History for quite some time and is finishing up his Masters degree at Northern Illinois University. I have known Josh for a number of years. We both worked on very similar Master's projects, so we have been in contact quite a bit over the years helping each other out. I know I was thrilled when I found out about this site - finally, a Triceratops bonebed! It has been interesting to see the project flesh out and to finally have the paper in print!

Josh and the Burpee crew found 130 bones and bone fragments belonging to Triceratops in the Hell Creek Formation during exploration between 2005 - 2007. The remains, found in a massive mudstone, indicated a minimum number of three juvenile individuals, based on the presence of three left nasals. The site was dominated by cranial and appendicular elements, with analysis showing that the remains were sorted by currents, washing away smaller elements. This site is the first published occurrence of a Triceratops bonebed.



Mathews, J. C., Brusatte, S. L., Williams, S. A. and Henderson, M. D. 2009. The first Triceratops bonebed and its implications for gregarious behavior. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(1):286-290

"Ceratopsid dinosaurs are some of the most common fossils in Upper Cretaceous terrestrial strata of western North America. They are often found in bonebeds, which are accumulations of vertebrate fossils from more than one individual that are concentrated along a bedding plane or throughout a single bed (Eberth and Getty, 2005). For example, 20 bonebeds have been reported from Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada, which contain Centrosaurus and Styracosaurus (Visser,1986; Ryan et al., 2001; Eberth and Getty, 2005). Additional bonebeds from localities across western North America have yielded remains of Agujaceratops (Lehman, 1982, 1989, Lucas et al., 2006), Anchiceratops (Dodson, 1996, Ryan et al., 2001), Einiosaurus (Rogers, 1990, Sampson, 1995), Pachyrhinosaurus (Langston, 1975; Tanke, 1988; Ryan et al., 2001), Styracosaurus (Dodson et al., 2004), Torosaurus (Hunt, 2005), and Zuniceratops (Wolfe and Kirkland, 1998). Some of these bonebeds contain the remains of hundreds to possibly thousands of individuals and represent catastrophic mass death assemblages that strongly indicate herding behavior (Eberth, 1996). Others contain significantly fewer individuals, with some preserving fewer than five.

Although Triceratops is the most common dinosaur in the terminal Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation (White et al., 1998), known from over 50 singleton specimens collected since the late nineteenth century, no bonebeds or associations of multiple individuals have previously been reported. A new locality in the latest Maastrichtian Hell Creek Formation of southeastern Montana, discovered in the summer of 2005 by a field crew from the Burpee Museum of Natural History (BMR) in Rockford, Illinois, contains the remains of three juvenile-sized Triceratops. This is the first occurrence of multiple individuals of Triceratops in the same quarry and raises potentially interesting questions regarding Triceratops paleobiology."

Homer the Triceratops at the Burpee Museum. See more pictures here.

Mathews, J. C., Brusatte, S. L., Williams, S. A., & Henderson, M. D. (2009). The first Triceratops bonebed and its implications for gregarious behavior Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 29 (1), 286-290

Field Work Favorites

Dave over at Geology News is hosting the November issue of the Accretionary Wedge and is looking for post on your favorite place to do field work. Now this is something I can talk about!! But it is also hard to do - I love alot of the places I have had a chance to work at. I can't pick just one place.... I can narrow it down to two. To those who know me best, this will not be a surprise: Big Bend National Park and Glacier National Park.

Big Bend is just a wonder - its such an odd place. Every plant there wants to poke, prick or stick you, and with the intention of making you bleed. Its hot. Not just hot. It can be ungodly hot - its awesome. There is really no shade there, so it is all sun, all the time, which is great! It does rain every now and then, that is true. Its remote, which it nice because it keeps your normal human away - you really have to want to go there to go there, because there is really no other reason to be in that part of the world. The general lack of humans can be nice (avoid spring break season however). All of the areas in the park I have worked are nice and off the beaten path so encounters with humans is at a nice all time low, which is always a plus. The geology though of Big Bend is just spectacular! It is everywhere and just so in your face (just like at Glacier). I think that may be one of the things that really caught my heart. Every way you look you just wonder - "now why is that there" or "what does this mean" - it really keeps your mind working IMO.






I went down to the park my first time for a spring break geology field trip in 2001 when I was an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas. It was a wonderful trip! There were these two van full of geology students and we just descended upon the place full of excitement. Many adventures took place, including having one van's fuel filter bust (the nearest parts store was about 2-3 hours away, at least), climbing the second highest peak in Texas (Emory Peak - 7,795 feet, picture) and canoeing the Rio Grande through Santa Elena Canyon. But I digress....To go on the trip you had to do the typical geology student thing and write a research paper and give a short presentation on it while you were in the park. I, naturally (as the only vert paleo student at U of AR at the time), gave my talk on the fossils known from the park. Little did I know then that this would be a big part of my future...........


When the time came to look for grad schools I found the website of Dr. Tom Lehman who teaches at Texas Tech in Lubbock. He worked on ceratopsid dinosaurs, which was something I was very interested in working on, and worked in Big Bend. I thought that sounded pretty darn good, so applied, and got in. He had a ceratopsian that needed worked on, from the Javelina Formation (late Maastrichtian), and that also sounded pretty great, so that is what I worked on. It had been excavated in 1969-1970 by Dr. Wann Langston and crew from the University of Texas at Austin and had never been worked on (other than two elements from the site figured in a thesis). I got the material from the Texas Memorial Museum and full prepared it. We also relocated the site and surface prospected (some success), then reexcavated to see if we could find more material (nada). It was a great project and I really enjoyed my time in the field, both working at my site and helping other graduate students with their field projects. I have also returned to the park several times for field work, geology/paleo trips and canoeing. It was a great time and a wonderful place to work! The result of my thesis work was recently published in the latest issue of the Journal of Paleontology.






I first went to Glacier National Park when I was still in high school (picture). From the moment I first saw the place I immediately feel in love with it! The place is just magic! It was something I thought could only exist in paintings. You just feel totally connected with nature there. Its a great place. I never thought that eight years later I would get to do something I love in a place that I love. Never in a million years did I think I would have an opportunity like that. Part of that thinking was that I knew the majority of the rocks in the park are Precambrian in age, something, at the time, I was not *that* interested in, fossil wise. As grad school was finishing, I was pretty exhausted and looking for something to do. A GeoCorps position at Glacier was listed and I really felt like the job posting had been written for someone like me. So I applied. Immediately. And called them. And stayed on it until I found out I had the job. The job was to write a paleontology report on the fossils known from the park. I was excited to get the job and drove right into my work when I got there. I did an intensive literature search and started to try and relocate old fossil localities first identified by Walcott and others from the early part of the 1900's. I got to go to some really beautiful places in search of these fossils.


The fossils mostly include billion year old stromatolites, with the rare eucaryote (Horodyskia moniliformis), and the occasional Cretaceous bivalve thrown in for good measure. Along the way I found some new sites and documented many of the old locations. The shear number of fossils in Glacier in mind boggling (even if they are almost all stromatolites - they are still cool!)! If you know what you are looking for you can see them all over the place. Huge long bioherms, colorful red and green laminated hunks, and circular cross sections are some of the more common you will see.


And in the process of working in Glacier I discovered that I can work on things outside of my comfort zone! I learned more working those 4 short months in the park that I have in a long while I think. It was excited to dive into something new and different and I developed a good skill for that type of project which has led me to continue writing and developing these types of reports for different National Park Service networks. To date I have written the Pacific Islands, Great Lakes, and Heartlands Network Paleontology Resource Reports and just recently started to work on my 4th Network Report on the Cumberland Piedmont Network! I only wish the network reports had a field component like Glacier did!

You can see some of my past post on the Geology of Glacier here (and here, here, here, and here).

NOVA: Arctic Dinosaurs on tomorrow!

Don't forget to watch/set your DVR/Tivo to record the 2008 fall season premier of NOVA! This episode will tell the tale of fossil hunting in Alaska. Tony Fiorillo (Dallas Museum of Natural History) has been working along the Colville River with a team from the University of Alaska for several years on a dinosaur bonebed that contains the remains of animals such as Pachyrhinosaurus and Edmontosaurus.

From the NOVA website [link]: The program follows a unique field expedition, covered exclusively by NOVA, as it sets out for Alaska's North Slope to defrost a jackpot of new fossil clues. Seventy-million-year-old fossil bones uncovered at the site include those of giant plant-eaters like Edmontosaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus as well as big-toothed meat-eaters such as the T. rex-like Gorgosaurus. On the expedition, the team of researchers combines extreme engineering and perilous fossil hunting—including blasting a deep tunnel into the permafrost to collect fossils trapped beneath the icy soil—to reveal provocative new clues both as to how the polar dinosaurs lived and to their final extinction. With the aid of stunning CGI animations of these Cretaceous beasts, and with Alaska's spectacular wilderness as a backdrop, NOVA breathes life into the polar dinosaurs' lives and environment in vivid detail.

Be sure to check you local listings to see what time it is on. I know it is on here tomorrow (October 7) on PBS at 7pm.

Welcome Pachyrhinosaur lakustai!!

The name Pachyrhinosaur lakustai was finally revealed yesterday for the new Grand Prairie/Pipestone Creek ceratopsian! From the press release at LiveScience:

"A catastrophic event 72.5 million years ago left a herd of giant, horned dinosaurs buried to become fossils. Now scientists have identified the extinct creatures as a new species.

The fossils, found in Northwest Alberta, Canada, revealed a herd of so-called ceratopsian dinosaurs that perished together. The animals are characterized by a bony frill on the back of the skull ornamented with smaller horns.

Parts of at least 27 individual animals were recovered at the site.

These dinosaurs also had large bony structures above their nose and eyes, which lends them their name: Pachyrhinosaurus (thick-nosed lizard). These structures probably supported horns of keratin, said researcher Philip Currie, Canada research chair of dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Alberta, who was involved in the excavations.

The new species of Pachyrhinosaurus is closely related to Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis, which is known from younger rocks near Drumheller and Lethbridge in southern Alberta, Currie said. The newfound species is a smaller animal with many differences in the ornamental spikes and bumps on the skull.

The adults of both species have massive bosses, or protuberances, of bone in the positions where other horned dinosaurs (like Centrosaurus and Triceratops) have horns. However, juveniles of the new species resemble juveniles of Centrosaurus in having horns rather than bosses.

Northwest Alberta was not previously known for dinosaur material. In the 1970s, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta began to lead excavations and studies of the Pipestone Creek bone bed there. The naming of the new species, Pachyrhinosaur lakustai, honors Al Lakusta, a now retired science teacher in Grande Prairie, Alberta.

"The density of the Pipestone Creek bonebed is exceptional and surpasses many of Alberta's other ceratopsian bonebed sites," Currie said. "The preservation of the material is outstanding and was easy to collect. The number of bones, from all age groups, made complex investigations possible regarding behavior and growth patterns."

The site contains fossils from young and old individuals, allowing researchers to describe individual variations and growth patterns, investigate the possibility of sexual dimorphism, and hypothesize on a herding lifestyle.

With this new species, researchers will now have more data to give a better understanding of the ancient life and ecosystems in northwestern Alberta in the Cretaceous period, Currie said.

The study of the Pachyrhinosaurs is detailed in a book, "A New Horned Dinosaur from an Upper Cretaceous Bone Bed in Alberta," by Currie, Wann Langston, Jr. and Darren H. Tanke (NRC Press, 2008). [Link to buy the book here]

"Ongoing cooperation between Grande Prairie Regional College, the Royal Tyrrell Museum and the University of Alberta has uncovered many additional sites and fossils in our region," said Jack O'Toole, chair of the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Project.

Andrew Neuman, executive director of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, explained the importance of the Pipestone Creek site. "Working on a previously unknown site that is abundant in dinosaur material shows how rich the entire province of Alberta is in paleontological resources," he said."

The book is still unavailable on Amazon.com but you can order it directly here. I can not wait to get my copy!

(pictures are from River of Death Dinosaur Centre)

CONGRATS LAURA!!!

I just want to send a big congratulations out there to my friend Laura Wilson whose first published paper "Comparative taphonomy and paleoecological reconstruction of two microvertebrate accumulations from the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation (Maastrichtian), eastern Montana" came out in the new issue of PALAIOS today. Check it out! [abstract - PDF] [paper - BioOne]

"Although microvertebrate accumulations are commonly used for paleoecological reconstructions, taphonomic processes affecting the final taxonomic composition of an accumulation are often ignored. This research explores the effects of abiotic taphonomic processes on the taxonomic composition of terrestrial microvertebrate accumulations by comparing a floodplain and a channel lag deposit from the Maastrichtian Hell Creek Formation in eastern Montana. Distribution of skeletal elements with specific physical attributes and relative abundance of taxa correlate with the hydraulic indicators (i.e., grain size, sedimentary structures) of the depositional facies. Transport distances, hydraulic equivalencies of dominant skeletal elements, amount of hydraulic sorting and reworking, and degree of time averaging vary between deposits and significantly affect taxonomic distributions. Relative abundance data, in conjunction with chi-square test results and rank-order analysis, show that size, shape, abrasion, and taxonomic compositions vary significantly between assemblages. The fine-grained assemblage is dominated by tabular, low-density elements, such as cycloid scales and fish vertebrae. Dense, equidimensional elements, such as teeth and ganoid fish scales, dominate the sandstone assemblage. Rank-order analysis results demonstrate that relative abundance of hydraulically equivalent skeletal elements from morphologically similar organisms can be compared regardless of accumulation in nonisotaphonomic deposits. Statistical comparisons were made among osteichthyans using ganoid scales, caudates using vertebrae, ornithischians using teeth, and testudinates using shell fragments. Results show that portions of the assemblage analyzed using hydrodynamically equivalent elements are not significantly different, despite different depositional environments."