Surprise jacket contents

Sometimes a bit of exploratory prep shows everything in the jacket. Sometimes there is more fun stuff buried deeper. We came across UTC's syncervical the other day. Sorta smooshed but still more or less recognizable. Hooray!

Centrosaur prep binge

We begin week #2 of our prep efforts with renewed energy! The more we work on it, the more neat stuff we find. Case in point the jacket labelled "?tibia" turns out to be a complete right humerus, with a total length of 70cm. An ulna and fibula have also turned up, and field sketches seem to show a femur. This appears to be a fairly large centrosaur, approaching the size of our Triceratops prorsus skeleton "Gundy". If any of you researchers have good PDF references on centrosaurs, please contact me, I don't have library access so modern papers are relatively difficult to come by.

Right humerus

Ulna!

Other jackets are showing they have much more in them than what was recorded in the field notes. The jacket below looks to contain a predentary, several ribs, and a least one strange unknown (as of yet) element. We should know soon though!

All kinds of stuff in there.

Horn-faces and prep

We restarted work today on a dinosaur project that I'm actually pretty excited about. With the new discoveries from Utah, it looks more and more like the ceratopsian dinos of the Campanian are very specific to geographical area, in addition to stratigraphic level. For us working in the Judith River that means that you can maybe find Avaceratops and Monoclonius, according to the now seemingly dated conventional wisdom. Except that a new specimen of Ceratops montanus was recently discovered near our dig areas. And we've found things that look a heck of a lot like Anchiceratops. And Styracosaurus. And bits of a big honkin thing that looks a bit like the newly described Kosmoceratops. Oops. What a mess.

Dig site at the end of excavatoion

Typical jacket showing typical not falling down hill bone

The critter we're working on now is a centrosaurine nicknamed "UTC". It was discovered in 2004, and has sat on our shelves for much of the in-between time. It's time to knock out the prep. Unfortunately the specimen was discovered coming out skull first, with those parts slumping slowly downhill. It's going to be an interesting challenge getting it back together.

oooh epoccipitals!

The parts that we have are pretty interesting though, and as prep continues we may be able to get a good idea of what critter we have. Heck, based on the explosion of ceratiopsian discoveries in the past few years (and how most researchers avoid the Judith River Formation like the plague), there's even the possibility that this animal is a new species. We'll keep you updated on the progress as more bones get prepared.

Fossil of the week: 5/29/09

This past week I was attending the 8th Conference on Fossil Resources in St. George, UT. The second group of talks all focused on the Campanian aged flora and fauna of the western interior. A few brief mentions of the poor neglected duckbill dinosaur fauna were made, but I wanted to share with you an image of one that I'd love to find: "The duckbill that ate Manhattan!" Paleo Tech Jacob Jett (6'4" tall, shown back in his younger days) is shown for scale.

This isolated rib bone was discovered in the upper Judith River Formation (Campanian aged) in the summer of 2004 while excavating a centrosaurine horned dinosaur called "UTC". Isolated duckbill skeletal remains are not uncommon at dig sites. In fact, juvenile hadrosaur jaws have been found at both our  "Joyce" and "Pete 3" sites in the same area.

Unfortunately, isolated postcranial remains on hadrosaurs aren't very diagnostic, so it is impossible to say which critter this rib belongs to. It is a good deal longer than our longest rib on "Big Ed", the 34 foot long Edmontosaurus annectens that is now on display in Korea. I'd estimate the body length of this duckbill to be at least 40 feet.