The Accidental Ichthyornis

Field identifications are problematic.

In mid October of this year the weather in Kansas was still warm enough to extend our dig season. That trip was pretty successful, finding a back half of a Protosphyraena and several small fish. Early on, Mike even thought he found another Pteranodon leg.

The drive to the site is a lot tougher when you can't see landmarks

We came out early in the morning. Man was it foggy. The entire day was supposed to be dedicated to finishing up excavation at several small sites. Since the "Pteranodon leg" site was so small, Mike and Jacob spearheaded the excavation there, while I wandered off to collect a Cimolichthys head and isolated Ichthyodectes site.

Several bones coming out at the site as discovered. Definitely not fish.

The "Pteranodon leg" showed some promising chunks of bone coming out, however inspection as they got down to the bone layer showed not a whole lot was there. Not like the large bones we were hoping to find for a Pterosaur.

That's a big hole for such a little block

Not a huge worry though, we perimeter the sites and very rarely expose the bone in the field, we will just find out what the "Pteranodon leg" looks like when we get back to the lab.

Jacob jackets and despairs as I tell him we have to go dig up another fish

Looking back at the video, just as Jacob began jacketing the specimen, I show up back at the site proudly announcing the discovery of the "Nia" Xiphactinus site that I blogged about last time. We all decided to drive over to the big fish and start work as the jacket cured. We were so stoked about the big fish that it was about a month later when we finally asked ourselves "Hey! Where did that jacket go?"

Turns out, we left it sitting there in the field, right next to a regularly visited oil well. Whoops! Over Christmas, Mike returned to the site to see if someone had poached it. Nope, the jacket was still exactly where we had left it. I guess you can say we got dang lucky. Let's never do that again.

Mike pulled it out and brought it back to the lab, where it sat for a week as I let it dry out (dry chalk behaves better than wet stuff when prepping, especially with small fossils). That's when the Eureka Moment happened: prepping down on the "Pteranodon leg" things weren't looking right. I immediately switched to my microscope, pin vise and very low pressure air abrasion (about 3psi with sodium bicarbonate blast media). My suspicions on the specimen's identity were confirmed when I found teeth. Pteranodon doesn't have teeth, but there's one small thing in the chalk with reptile-textured bone that does have it: a bird! Not only was it a bird, but the only complete articulated skull of Ichthyornis, who had been found only in fairly incomplete form since Marsh's days in the 1870s. This accidental and overlooked jacket suddenly turned into one of the rarest finds in the entire 160 year history of fossil hunting in the Niobrara.

Bird teeth, just a few milimeters long

Stay tuned for project updates as we work on this spectacular fossil.

No love for Ichthyodectes?

It seems like nearly every year a new book, film, or television program comes out featuring the long-dead seaway that covered most of the central part of North America back in the late Cretaceous. Invariably they have cameos featuring Xiphactinus, Cretoxyrhina, Protosphyraena, and even the "bait fish" Gillicus and Enchodus. They have mosasaurs, pterosaurs and even sea turtles. If you didn't follow the science closely, you'd understandably figure that's about all that lived in that shallow sea.

Our cast specimen restored in all its 3d glory

Truth be told, there were probably a few hundred types of fish in that seaway. Dr. Kenshu Shimada made a decent attempt to catalog all of them a few years ago, but like all good science on the Niobrara, it was getting out of date almost as soon as it was published. It's really amazing that 120 years after collecting work began in Western Kansas, new critters are still being found. I'm not going to go into details on them (I'll save them for other blog posts) and instead focus on this fish that is criminally underrepresented in the literature and online.

RMDRC 11-018, a massive 9 foot Ichthyodectes

If it's Wikipedia entry were any indication of its importance, what does the text containing a whopping total of 89 words tell you? That's right, 89 whole words, some of which are even talking about other related fish. Lame.

Some of the teeth of RMDRC 11-018. Yikes

Ichthyodectes, a fish with moderately terrifying teeth and with a body length approaching 9 feet, it's not cheered on much. Sure it's pretty common in the Niobrara, but it's also basically a pocket Xiphactinus (see, using the Wikipedia trick of talking about it's cooler cousin to gin up some interest). An average scouting season for us will find 5 or so specimens identified through cranial material. Probably more, but postcranially all ichthyodectids of about the same size pretty much look identical.

RMDRC 14-027, excavated with a film crew, watch for it soon on TV!

Perhaps a big reason as to why Ichthyodectes gets so little love is that there are so few specimens on display in museums, even fewer ones that look, um, not silly. Perhaps we need more museums to decide that decent specimens of lesser known fossil fish of the Niobrara are just as important for display as mosasaurs or sharks or Xiphactinus. Maybe I'm just asking for too much. In any case, I've pretty much doubled the amount of useful Ichthyodectes pics on the interwebs, so I'll count it as a win.