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

Colossal Fossil: Triceratops Cliff

From the Boston Museum of Science Press Release:

"Triceratops Cliff made international headlines in April 2008 when it was the first Triceratops ever sold on public auction (at Christie’s in Paris) and bought by an anonymous collector for $942,797. A New York Times editorial said that “this fossilized superstar deserves a public audience…” Shortly after the auction, the Museum of Science, Boston received a call from that same anonymous collector who had loved visiting the Museum as a child. Wanting to share this discovery with as many people as possible, the collector offered the fossil on long-term loan to the Museum of Science — Boston's most attended cultural attraction. The Museum, which already had a full-size model Triceratops as well as two full-size models of Tyrannosaurus rex on display, was thrilled to exhibit the real fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur. (see picture here, blogger cant resize it for some reason)

The Museum will unveil Triceratops Cliff (named after the donor’s grandfather) to the world for the first time Saturday, November 15, 2008, in the exhibit Colossal Fossil: Triceratops Cliff. The newly created exhibit will inspire visitors to imagine Cliff’s life and death in the age of the dinosaurs and compare the model with the real thing. Visitors will learn about the Hell Creek Formation and discover why the area is so rich with fossils. Visitors will explore other fossils from the Cretaceous period, such as fish and turtles, learning about florae and faunae that existed in Cliff’s lifetime. Virtual exhibit interactives will allow visitors to zoom in for a closer look at Cliff — right down to the bone, and compare a model to the real fossil. A fossilization animation and a T. rex versus Triceratops comparison station will ask how fossils form and why mostly complete specimens are so rare. (another picture)

Cliff was unearthed in 2004 on private land in the Hell Creek Formation, its bones still embedded in blocks of rock. The bones were removed from their rock matrix by the paleontological company ZOIC and reassembled as a skeleton in their lab in Italy with missing bones cast by model makers. Cliff's skeleton, which took Museum staff seven days to reassemble for display in Boston, appears as a completely articulated (or free standing) skeleton. Its gender is unknown."

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."