Dakota Goes Digital: Replicating a Mummy Arm

Reonstruction by Natee Puttapipat from Drumheller et al., PLoS One, 2022

Confession time: I love giving nicknames to the specimens that I find. It makes them really easy to recall compared to listing off a specimen number. Valerie? Yeah that's a Tyrannosaurus rex. Cap'n Chuck, yeah that's a Platecarpus I found in 2006. So much simpler than remembering RMDRC 22-014 and RMDRC 06-009 respectively. And we're of course not the only ones to follow this practice.

The frill of Princess Lumpybumps, how it got its nickname

Way back in 1999, a teenager named Tyler Lyson found a dinosaur on a ranch owned by his uncle in North Dakota. The specimen was impressive, and was recognized early on to be a "mummy" of a duck-billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus, that had lots of fossilized skin surrounding its bones. Of course a specimen like this was going to need a nickname so Tyler called it "Dakota". The specimen was excavated by the Marmath Research Foundation in 2004. Fast forward a few more years and Tyler is now Dr. Tyler Lyson, who we work collaboratively with from time to time at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Dakota has now made it to the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum in Bismarck, reposited with the North Dakota Geological Survey. More information is available on the ND State Museum Blog.

Denver Museum crew excavating a Triceratops that I discovered

In the museum in North Dakota, Dakota the Edmontosaurus has recently gone on display showcasing the original fossils, new artwork by the incredibly talented Natee Puttapipat, and more importantly replicas of many of the skin impressions. Replicating a dinosaur mummy is a tough thing to do, since so much research down to the molecular level is going on with Dakota and nobody wants to risk contaminating it. Traditional silicone molds were determined to be too risky for the safety of the specimen, so everything was scanned at 25 micron level of detail. To put that into perspective, a human hair is usually 50-75 microns in diameter, so this scanning preserves even the finest structures digitally.

Dr. Clint Boyd and crew supervising the move of Dakota, from ND State Museum Blog.

We at Triebold Paleontology Inc. are world leaders in making digital things physical again. Our 3D department was able to print the 3D file full-sized, separated mostly on crack lines going through the real specimen. We then took those parts and assembled them into the full arm. The detail is so precise that you can see the marks where researchers cut away a sample of the skin on the original fossil to analyze. 

Prototype copy being painted with the original arm in the background

Why am I mentioning this now? TPI has recently completed an agreement with the Heritage Center in North Dakota to offer replicas of this amazing fossil arm for the very first time! You may have seen the first (and up to that point only) copy of the replica on display at SVP this past year in Minneapolis. We are now the only authorized company that can make these exquisitely detailed and painted copies for museum exhibits across the world. Contact Jacob Jett for pricing and delivery timelines 

Prototype copy at the NDGS display during SVP 2024

Bigfoot from Wyoming: The largest dinosaur foot found yet

Hey! I published on something, 18 years after I started the paper.

The awesome scientific article is here on PeerJ's website, open access for anyone to read and download. As far as I can tell, it's gotten almost 8000 reads so far, so not too shabby! I also did a companion blog post for them where you can read all kinds of information on why exactly it took 20 years from discovery to publication. Short version of the story: I got a job and it wasn't a huge priority to me.

KUVP 129716 "Annabelle". Bigfoot was found under the tail.

As someone that has to self-fund all my research projects, publication costs are a real issue. I wanted to go open-access as I think making another company richer by giving them the fruits of my labor (on a public specimen) is kinda wrong, but there are some expenses in order to publish it properly. I simply don't have the free cash to do that.

More brachiosaur material from the site, me for scale.

Then came February. I had already assembled a small team of experts to finally move the project along, as I was getting tired of constipating science. Emanuel Tschopp and Femke Holwerda were Team Europe, and David Burnham and Myself were Team Kansas. We had no idea where we would publish but we had already begun preparing measurements and basic text. PeerJ surprisingly had a special promotion for their 5th anniversary offering to waive publication costs for articles submitted during that month. That was an offer too hard to pass up, but could we do it?

Archaeopteryx gawks at the metatarsals

The writing crew huddled over Google Hangouts and assembled a pretty decent draft in just 2 weeks (!!!) complete with figures for submission. Femke referred to it as "Rambo Writing" and I don't think it's too far off the mark as a description. We submitted it and waited.

Making the model of the MT IV

In a few weeks we heard back: Accepted with minor revisions. Minor except we had to refigure all of the original bones. So off I went to Kansas with Triebold Paleontology Inc's Artec Spider scanner and 3D render rig. Not included in the paper (but existing) are complete 3D models of every bone on this foot. Contact KUVP if you need access for research, I think they came out pretty well.

Completed model of MT II

After that, things went pretty well! We resubmitted and it was just a very short time between then and it coming out to the world. Press was also pretty kind (though they kept referring to me as "Dr." and thought it was a footprint instead of an actual foot). Heck, I made it into Newsweek! Pretty wild.

In the news(week)!

Why didn't we say it's definitely from Brachiosaurus? Simple: No Morrison Formation Brachiosaurus specimen has ever had any pes material recovered with it, so we didn't have any overlapping elements to compare with. Could it be Brachiosaurus? Sure, even probably, but we simply don't have that smoking gun just yet.

Daspletosaurus Assembly: Building a Frightful Lizard

There is actually a very good reason why I haven't updated this blog in a while: We've been up to our armpits in the lab building the prototype cast copy of Pete III, our 11m Daspletosaurus.

Ilium cast fresh in the mold

Progress is going quick by Academic standards, and we hope to finish the cast by early May.

Both feet before assembly

Jacob and I called "dibs" on making this skeleton, since we've been working on the project for 10 years.

We just admired this for a few days

It really is a great thing to see all this hard work finally amount to something tangible

Making the pubis. It is no longer blue

Plus everyone loves a huge tyrannosaur, especially one way more rare than T. rex.

Progress as of a few days ago. Tail is 17 feet (5.2m) long

Stay tuned for some more exciting progress really soon. We're finishing the neck, working out the gastral basket and have a few cervical ribs to go. 

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