Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew by John Pickrell & John Pickrell

Author:John Pickrell & John Pickrell [Pickrell, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Prehistoric Creatures, NAT007000, Science/Paleontology, Nature/Dinosaurs &#38, SCI054000
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

The pygmy polar T. rex

Fiorillo manages Alaska’s other long-running dinosaur research program and, along with his colleagues at the Perot Museum in Dallas, has been coming here nearly every year since 1998. One of his most exciting discoveries, a small tyrannosaur called Nanuqsaurus, was made almost by accident.

Four out of five bone beds around the Colville River are hadrosaur, but in 2006 Fiorillo was working on something else. At a 4-metre-square site called the Kikak-Tegoseak Quarry, he was excavating the skull of a Pachyrhinosaurus, the only other dinosaur that appears often in these deposits. Slowly, as they excavated the site, they realised the quarry contained the skulls of not just one, but 10 Pachyrhinosaurus – the remains of animals that had likely been killed in a flash flood. ‘We knew that this quarry had a number of horned dinosaurs, and that was unusual given that most of the bone beds here had hadrosaur bones’, Fiorillo says. ‘This was something different and that’s what drew my attention.’

Over two years, his team excavated 6 tonnes of fossil-bearing rocks from this quarry. These were lifted out by helicopter, flown out from Fairbanks on a fixed-wing aircraft and then trucked to Dallas. At around this time, the Perot Museum was in the throes of putting together exhibitions for its new building. ‘I recognised that we had in the excavation at least one skull of a Pachyrhinosaurus, and it was potentially a beautiful skull and display-worthy, so really our focus was on getting that skull ready for display in our new dinosaur hall.’

When Fiorillo talks about one skull, what he means is that there were large numbers of fragments of one skull that had to be pieced back together. The ice, snow and permafrost, and cycles of freezing and thawing, tend to break the fossils into pieces. ‘It actually took about four years of preparation and reconstruction to put it together so it would be stable enough to go on display’, he says. Another few years’ work after that revealed this was a new species, different from the two other known Pachyrhinosaurus species found further south.

Until the publication of that finding in 2012 and then a juvenile specimen in 2013,7 all their attention had been focused on the horned dinosaur fossils, and they didn’t even think about what else might be jumbled in with the remains. Once they’d passed that hurdle, however, Fiorillo and Perot Museum fossil preparator Ronald Tykoski decided to look at some of the other, non-ceratopsian bones they’d noticed sticking out of the blocks of rock brought from the quarry. A bit of probing and they found a jaw with sharp, pointy teeth and then other parts of a skull. They decided this was part of a tyrannosaur, but the pieces were very puzzling. The teeth were tiny, suggesting it was a juvenile, but other features were only usually found in adult dinosaurs. Eventually they realised they had a very small adult tyrannosaur.

T. rex, which was a close relative, was 12 metres

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