Please welcome the new "Avaceratops"

It's a happy day when we get to unleash a brand new dinosaur on the world. After 3 years of hard work and a lot of sweat, we get to show off our new primitive centrosaurine ceratopsian!

The newest skeletal, copyright Scott Hartman, used with permission

The skelton in all it's glory, Curator for scale

The bones of the specimen that were recovered, copyright Scott Hartman, used with permission

We discovered the specimen at the end of August 2012 on private land in central Montana. The specimen was found near the top of the Judith River Formation, in rocks approximately 75 million years old. You may notice we are using the name "Avaceratops" in quotes here. We're not trying to be coy or mysterious, but with the stratigraphic difference (our specimen is about 3 million years younger than the holotype) and the differences in skull morphology highlighted below, we have come to the conclusion that this is a different animal than true Avaceratops lammersi.

Someone put a lot of work into this. Tell me who you are so I can give credit!

The skull is quite different in detail. It totally lacks a nose horn, and the long brow horns (until recently a rarity in centrosaurine ceratopsians) point forward and even slightly back towards each other, much different than the other two known skulls. It's large "forehead" area is more reminiscent of the recently described Nasutoceratops, from about the same time in Utah.

Overall, the skeleton is 3.5m long and about 1.2m tall. We estimate the critter was about 3 to 4 years old when it died, both based on its relatively small size and the extensive lack of fusion in its skeletal elements. It's pelvis was reassembled from over 30 separate elements. What a job.

Digging down into the quarry site

After the dinosaur died, it's partially mummified body washed down a stream channel until it hit a logjam composed of not only actual logs, but the limb bones of a large hadrosaur. Here it lodged upside down and then began to partially disarticulate. Some of the dried skin over the hips was surprisingly well preserved though, as addressed in an earlier blog post. A few tyrannosaur teeth were found at the site, but we feel those were incidental background fossils, as no predation or scavenging marks were observed on the bones.

Tyrannosaur tooth found at the site

After all this painstaking work in sometimes miserable conditions, we are excited to share the product of this discovery with the rest of the world. After getting unveiled to the press on Wednesday, September 16 at 10:00am the mounted skeleton will be on display at the RMDRC for just a few weeks before making its first trip to Dallas, TX for the 75th meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. You must come see it!

The mount showing the horn shapes (and absences)

Rear view of skeleton

Ava Restoration Update: March

Reconstruction of the skull started with 40 individual bones

Whether they are big or small, all ceratopsians sure do have a lot of parts. When they are juveniles like our Avaceratops, the lack of fusion in bones makes that even more apparent. For example, the sacrum (the wad of bones that holds up the rear end of the animal) in adults is usually one giant unwieldy piece. In our young animal, it is 26 individual parts, all with some degree of crushing, though not always in the same direction or degree.

Sacral neural spines molded

More of the massive piles of sacral parts

We've finished preparing the specimen and are busy restoring the individual bones to get molded. Restoration is a catch-all phrase that can mean anything from putting a protective layer of consolidant over the surface to sculpting missing bits to molding crushed vertebral centra, casting them, then cutting up the casts to re-inflate them to their appropriate size.

Most of the ribs, many crushed in strange directions

We're even using our trusty 3d scanning and printing equipment again to make precise mirror images of elements we are missing from one side to help complete the skeleton. In the end we'll end up with everything we need for a full sized standing cast skeleton, hopefully by Memorial Day.

Dorsal neural spines. Each one gets a centrum once restored.

Keep watching the updates on this blog for more news and pics of the restoration, molding and mounting project.

Avaceratops layout

If you've been following the progress of our Avaceratops (or something like it) project, you may have noticed a lull in updates, especially after the completion of the reconstruction of the skull about a year ago. This is about to change.

Skull elements present (missing the predentary) Modified image courtesy Scott Hartman

This summer we finished preparation of all the material we recovered from the site, all 170 or so numbered bones plus a good amount of unnumbered things that were discovered deep within the larger jackets during lab work. 

3d model of the skull made using photogrammetry

We had no idea how complete this animal actually was. For the better part of a year the bones were in drawers and on shelves in no particular order, so it never really seemed that impressive.

Bryan and Jacob doing science

Once we laid it out however, we were shocked. This thing really does look like an animal! It takes up quite a bit of space in the "run over by a bus" pose right now, but when assembled, the specimen will be on the order of 13 feet (4m) long, and approximately 4 feet (1.2m) tall at the hips. A cute little juvenile!

Curator for scale

All of the missing bones will either be sculpted from scratch (last option) scanned from the opposite side and printed in mirror image, or be scanned from other ceratopsian specimens and be manipulated in the computer to fit before printing.

Obligatory Ava butt picture.

Avaceratops skull finished - Tucson out the door

So, we here in the lab have survived yet another pre-Tucson Gem and Mineral Show crunch. Barely. This year we are exhibiting our casts at the 22nd Street Show. Come by and see our new stuff, like the Megalonyx, Enchodus, Stangerochampsa and our new Avaceratops.

Pinchy!

Never thought that pile of bones would turn out like this

Speaking of that, the prototype is finished! We molded the masters and then cast them using a rotational casting machine. Very lightweight! The finished skull is 1.05m (3'5") long from rostrum to end of parietal.

First run of the 3d model made from photographs

Very cute, and since the brow horns are pretty darn near symmetrical, their tweezer-like form is probably real. Very different than Nasutoceratops or even the MOR specimen of Avaceratops that Penkalski and Dodson described. What that means precisely is something for the experts to work out.

Human for sacle

The Enchodus is also pretty darn cool looking. Coming in at just 5 feet long (1.7m), it's one of the scariest looking little fish I've ever dug up.

Enchodus prototype

Stop by the booth and check out the specimens. And if you would like a copy of the Avaceratops, tell Mike I sent you. He;ll give you a good deal.

Avaceratops Skull Resto

Cast mount of the holotype Avaceratops in Philadelphia

So after a year and a half of digging and preparation, what do you do with a big pile of bones? Put them together! At long last, our Avaceratops project is moving forward and is surprisingly starting to look like something. Avaceratops is a fairly poorly known animal, with only 2 partial and fragmentary skulls discovered before this one. Ours is filling in lots of gaps since 1: we have more bones than were known before and 2: the bones that we have are more or less complete, not busted up. This adds a degree of difficulty to the project since all the restorations done before made a few educated assumptions about their missing bits, and not all of those were accurate.

An older bone map of the skull bones we thought we recovered, based on an image by Scott Hartmann

Jaw bones both real and 3d printed

Where to start though? In treating this like a giant model kit, we first decided to make all the parts we needed. There will be 60 individual bones to deal with. While we have the lions share of those, we do not have them all. The first step is to mold all the original elements and cast them in plastic. This enables us to mount them and take distortion out without destroying any of the real fossil. Second we identified all the elements that we had one side of and needed the other. Those elements were laser scanned, mirror imaged in software, then printed out in plastic on one of our 3d printers. Lastly, some elements were flat out missing. Those were fortunately few, but they ended up getting sculpted.

So, let's begin with some parts. Boot for scale

Once the parts were poured, we cut apart a few casts where the bones were glommed together and it was too dangerous to try to pry the fossils apart. After fitting a few parts, some needed to get cut or bent to fit how they were supposed to, taking millions of years of crushing and distortion out. This is much trickier than it sounds. Our frontals were squished just enough in the ground that when the brow horns were attached to the mount, the tips crossed each other. That's probably not how they went in life. The casts were then adhered together into subassemblies ready for molding.

Where we are today.

Work is still ongoing but we hope to be done in the next week or so with the heavy work. Once the molding is done, the final product will be just 5 parts. Much easier to put together than 60.

3d scanner and printer up and running

After several years of fighting with technology, our 3d laser scanning program is up and running here at the RMDRC. We're currently scanning original specimens that are in the restoration queue in order to generate mirror image parts for missing bones. We started with simple parts on the Avaceratops including cranial and limb material, and progressed to more complicated things like the dentary and maxilla. Not satisfied with the amount of punishment we dished out on ourselves, we then tried Enchodus bits like the super thin premaxilla and operculum. They all turned out extremely well.

One of our new printers which works surprisingly well

Now that we have more complete sets of replicas to work with, our restoration of these specimens will be not only much more accurate but also faster.

Avaceratops lower jaw, with white 3d prints of actual material

Avaceratops tibia, split in a computer so it could fit in the printer

Next on the docket is some of the cranial material of our Daspletosaurus specimens. Donor parts from other animals will be brought in and scaled to size. Surprisingly easy to do with the software and operators we now have here. If you are out there and need some items scanned, give us a call!

Prepping the Avaceratops

It's long overdue for an update, and since the weather in Montana isn't cooperating with our plans to head up there today and finish our season in the Judith River, it's as good a time as any to show what we've gotten done in the lab.

Newer modification to Scott Hartman's illustration: now with no nose horn

Work is slow due to the fact that the bone of this juvenile animal is fairly soft and crumbly when not consolidated, and that many bones are jackstrawed together in larger blocks. Each bone is individually removed from its jacket and checked against the field inventory. When it's a new bone, not exposed in the field excavation, we give it a separate accession number to keep track of it in the lab.

Jacket disassembly with documentation

Typical multi bone jacket before removal

We're primarily using air scribes on the "firm" sanstone matrix, with air abrasion for the detailed work. In some cases, such as the extensive skin impressions over the left hip and rib area, we skip the abrasion in order to preserve the skin as best we can.

Skin texture preserved on the right ilium

Once out of the rock, we restore the cracks and missing bits with epoxy putty in order to get the bones ready for molding. Our current plan, due to the completeness of the skull and skeleton, is to mold everything and do a full skeletal restoration. The animal looks like it will be less than 1.5m tall at the hips - very manageable for a ceratopsian.

Molding jaw parts prior to laser scanning

Avaceratops now has skin!

Very large lambeosaur tibia on the east edge of the site

We've been so busy working the Avaceratops site in central Montana that I've hardly had a chance to think of this blog let alone update it. Luckily, that means we've found a lot of stuff, including most of the skeleton of this very rare animal.

Measuring a jacket before putting plaster over it

The site, which started out as a small hand dug pit at the bottom of a wash, ended up as a hole the size of a decent basement. Bobcat excavators, jackhammers and air tools (complete with 2 compressors running)made for a noisy and gritty dig site, but the work paid off.

That's a sizable hole

Using the bobcat to haul out heavy things

Prep is now starting in the lab with the ultimate goal of making a complete restored cast skeleton. We're slowly filling in our bone map, updating it weekly with the bones we're sure we have. Thanks to Scott Hartman for the base image. You can see more of his reconstructions here.

More bones to come as prep continues

Working the final jacket

As mentioned, the Avaceratops has a very faint set of skin impressions with it. Not extraordinarily spectacular, however it is the first time it's ever been found for this kind of dinosaur. I'm excited!

Flipped and getting lightened for transport

Can you see the skin pattern?

Field season in full swing

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. We've been in South Dakota and Montana working the Hell Creek and Judith River Formations respectively.

Jacob for scale before we open a Triceratops site

South Dakota had seen its fair share of rain, where we got rained out more in two weeks there than in my entire previous decade of Hell Creek digging combined. We pulled a few Triceratops bones and finished evaluating a few sites before moving on north.

Nanotyrannus teeth collected from a single lag deposit

In Montana, our main focus has been opening the Avaceratops dig again and pulling out more of the animal. Lots of bobcat work The back wall of the quarry is nearing 10 feet tall now. Hopefully we're ending the dig soon so we can explore... Enjoy the photos!

Huge fault in the Hell Creek. Jacob somewhere to the left

It's the greenest I've ever seen in July for Montana in the JRF

I cut the steep part of the bobcat road. It's pretty scary to use. 

Duckbill butt I found a few years ago. Finally excavated this year.

After excavation and pedestaling

Part of the Avaceratops braincase

Ava site a few weeks back, before Bobcat work to push the wall back