Removing Matrix
After preliminary cleaning of the fossil, bits of matrix may still mask important details. Removal of these pieces to aid identification and create a more attractive display specimen requires skill and infinite patience. It takes at least an hour to clean a small trilobite which has soft, relatively easy-to-remove shale embedded between its ribs. It may take days to clean a limestone slab with many crinoid crowns. The principle behind cleaning matrix from a fossil is to exploit the difference...
Stratigraphy
One of the important issues that will surface again and again in this book is the lack of stratigraphic information on the occurrence of most of the fossils that have been collected from the Smoky Hill Chalk. In this usage, stratigraphic occurrence refers to what approximate chronological level the fossil was found within the 2 00-m 600-ft. chalk unit. As noted earlier, this chalk was deposited in the Western Interior Sea over a period of about five million years. Fossils found near the bottom...
Table 1
Biostratigraphy of the Smoky Hill Chalk adapted from Hattin, 1982 Stewart, 1990 Everhart, 2001 . Time MYA Millions of Years Ago and boundaries as indicated by Hattin's 1982 marker units MU are approximate. The Smoky Hill Chalk Member of the Niobrara Chalk was deposited between 87 and 82 million years ago. Note that the Late Coniacian is unequally divided into two zones a lower zone P. pemiciosa from the base of the chalk to about MU 5 and a brief
time Late Jurassic to Early
Cretaceous locality North America Colorado, Utah and Wyoming , Africa Tanzania . Possibly Australia and Europe England and Romania size up to 10 ft 3 m long Dryosaurus also known as Dysalo-tosaurus was one of the largest of the hypsilophodonts. Although it was also one of the earliest, its anatomy was advanced in several ways. For example, each long, slender leg had only 3 toes. And there were no teeth in the front part of the upper jaw the horny beak at the front of the lower jaw met with a...
Book Contents And Format
We see photo above have endeavored to make this book as comprehensive as possible, within practical limitations. Of the 15 chapters that follow, four chapters 1-3 and 15 are of a general nature and apply to the full spectrum of early mammals, whereas the remaining 11 chapters deal with the anatomy, paleobiology, and systematics of the particular groups of mammals known from the Mesozoic, extinct and extant. In chapter 1, we provide some general background on mammals within the context of...
Other Times Other Sharks
This book is generally focused on a small geologically speaking , five-million-year window of time during the Late Cretaceous when the Smoky Hill Chalk was deposited on the bottom of the Western Interior Sea. The fauna from that interval 8 7-8 2 mya is the most widely collected and the most thoroughly studied of any period from the Cretaceous of Kansas. The chalk is accessible in many localities, preservation is excellent and the chalk matrix is relatively easy to remove. It is also my favorite...
Will The Real Tyrannosaurus Rex Please Stand Up
WSIH NORTH AMERICA, 65 MILLION YEARS AGO. The last of the dinosaurs are on the move. They're roaming inland and along the margins of a big, shallow inland sea. These animals are huge, many more than twenty feet long. But there are far fewer kinds of them than there were 10 million years before, when the seas were wider and the Huge herds of horned dinosaurs and giant duckbills tromp across the land, heading north in summer, south in winter. They munch on ferns and flowering plants. As they go,...
The Frontloader Transferred The Fossil Bundles To A Tiltbed Truck For The Bumpy
and sometimes stepping on the fossils, and turning Pat white . This is not my favorite activity. The only digging I did was separating the skull from the pelvis. The skull is the most important part of the anatomy because of what it can tell us about the animal's evolution and behavior. And it's the most delicate. This skull was so close to the pelvis that moving either might damage both. So if anyone was going to screw up, I wanted to be the one. I began scraping with an awl until I found a...
The History Of Collecting Dinosaurs
Another thing to notice about Table 1.1 is that our knowledge of horned dinosaurs, and of course of all dinosaurs, has a history and a very colorful and interesting history it is, as we shall see. There was a time when no one knew anything about dinosaurs. Indeed, the recognition of fossils themselves as the remains of once-living plants and animals that inhabited an ancient world was a very difficult intellectual accom plishment that we too easily take for granted we too readily heap scorn...
Internal Organs
The anatomy of reptiles enables them to live on land. Thanks to their dry, scaly skin and their excretion of uric acid instead of urea, they minimize water loss. The heart distributes blood in a double circuit. Crocodiles were the first vertebrates to have a four-chambered heart the separation of the ventricles is incomplete in all other reptiles. The lungs, developed beyond those of amphibians, contribute to cardiac efficiency by allowing for greater exchange of gases. Longevity 45 years in...
Condensed Limestone Community
Areas of Jurassic shelf often show sequences commencing with mud and passing upward through sandy mud and muddy sand and finishing with sand Communities 64 to 68 . If the water became very shallow at a distance from land i.e upon a shoal or 'swell' the currents carrying sediments were usually diverted to deeper parts of the sea. Little material was deposited on the sea floor in these shallow 'swell' areas except the remains of the animals and plants living there. Condensed limestones are...
discovering TREX
HE TOWN OF JORDAN in eastern Montana has been the headquarters of T. rex country for almost a hundred years. But I knew I wouldn't find anyone who had known the original T. rex discoverer, the great Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, since Brown had stopped digging here in 1909. The folks around Jordan surprised me, though, especially an energetic lady named Pauline Polly Wischmann, a historian from the nearby town of Circle. Pauline hadn't met Brown, but...
How To Make A Fossil Collection
People who live in the Cincinnati area are very lucky with respect to fossils. The rock of the area is abundantly supplied with well preserved fossils, and, because of the many hillsides, the rocks containing the fossils are well exposed. The great abundance of beautifully preserved fossils sometimes is bad for local collectors. They become so used to finding essentially perfect specimens that they ignore fossils that aren't complete and fully eroded from the rock. That's really sad, because...
T Rex Weather
kirk johnson collected this beautiful fossil leaf in montana of an extinct member of the laurales. a group that contains avocado and cinnamon trees. Knowing the plants tells us something about the climate in T. rex's time. We have modern relatives for many of these plants and so we know what climates suit them best. According to these analogies, during most of T. rex's time, the climate was what you'd expect to find on average in North Carolina, but without so much change between seasons....
The Fossil Record Of Horned Dinosaurs
With ceratopsians, we are rather fortunate. Horned dinosaurs have one of the best fossil records of any group of dinosaurs. There are close to four hundred specimens in museum collections around the world. Twenty-three genera and perhaps thirty species have been described to date, with more to come.11 There is an average of more than 30 specimens per genus. Even if the extremely abundant Psittacosaurus and Protoceratops were eliminated from this tally, we would still be left with a respectable...
Prelude to the Paleozoic Late Proterozoic Collisions and the Grenville Orogeny
The oldest rocks in New York, exposed in the Adirondack Mountains and the Hudson Highlands, are somewhat more than 1 billion years old. These are crystalline rocks that were metamorphosed or altered from older rocks by enormous heat and pressure Figure 4.2 . Some were originally igneous rocks, formed from the cooling and crystallization of magmas, and others are sedimentary deposits, such as quartz sandstones, limestones, and shales. These were transformed metamorphosed by recrystallization and...
lifestyles of the huge and famous
NCE WE'VE FOUND AS much hard data as we can from our T. rex skeleton and all the others, and from T. rex's environment, we're back to speculating about T. rex in the flesh, this time with some more reasonable inferences. We're left with an awful lot of pure guesswork, however, since we still don't have a T. rex nest, eggs, or much of a young T. rex. It's a reasonable guess to say female T. rexes laid eggs, since we have eggs from many other dinosaurs, including carnivores like the man-sized...
TREX predator or scavenger
AAA AS T.REX A VICIOUS killer Ask mostanyone, including most paleontologists, and they'll say yes. Ask me, I'd say no. You may have noticed that I haven't referred to it as a predator once in this book, only as a carnivore. We're all guessing, but I think those who cast T. rex as a predator are letting some common prejudices cloud their thinking. For sure, T. rex ate a lot. It takes a lot of hamburger to feed a six-ton, or bigger, animal. But it shouldn't have mattered to T. rex whether lunch...
name Ursus spelaeus time Pleistocene to Recent locality Europe Austria
Germany, Netherlands, Spain, UK and USSR size 6 ft 6 in 2 m long The genus Ursus is represented today by the brown, or grizzly, bear, the polar bear and the American black bear. But in Pleistocene times, the cave bear, Ursus spelaeus, was a particularly numerous and impressive species. It lived in Europe during the height of the Ice Age, and often escaped the worst of the winters by hibernating in Alpine caves. Many bears seem to have congregated together for this long, annual sleep, to judge...
A Brief History of Fossil Fish Collecting in Kansas
Though not from Kansas, the first known fossil fish from the Niobrara Chalk was collected by the Lewis and Clark expedition in August of 1804 from the bank of the Missouri River in what is now Harrison County, Iowa. The fish jaw ANSP 55 16 is currently in the collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and is the only fossil specimen surviving from that expedition Spamer et al., 2000 . The history of this fossil is somewhat confused, however, because it was originally...
The Best Fossil Finds Are Often Those Where Only A Bit Of Bone Sticks Out
ABOVE THE SURFACE. IN THOSE CASES MOST OF THE BONE IS STILL SHELTERED FROM EROSION. THAT'S HOW IT WAS WITH KATHY WANK EL'S T. REX. during the long dry spells. When it shrinks it cracks all over, making the ground into a layer of cracked crust over dust, stuff we call popcorn. You can just imagine what the popcorn cracking does to bones. If a T. rex died and was fossilized in bentonite, it could end up in a million pieces. Yet another reason it's so hard to find a dead T. rex is that there...
Wyoming Asia China and
Europe France size 5 ft 1.5 m long Hyrachyus was generally very similar to Heptodon see pp. 258-261 , but a little larger and more heavily built. It was a common and widespread animal. Many species are known, ranging from the size of a modern tapir to that of a fox. Hyrachus appears to be ancestral to both the later tapirs and the rhinoceroses. Indeed, its resemblance to a primitive form of the latter group is so .pronounced that it is often classed as rhinoceros, albeit a lightweight one.
Cretaceous Park T Rexs Animal World
We know a lot more about T. rex's world than we do about most other dinosaur communities. Quite a few of the dinosaurs we know about come from the era of the tyrannosaurs, the last 15 million years of dinosaur life. That's less than 10 percent of dinosaur time. The richest collections of dinosaurs, however, come from Montana and western Canada at the time of Albertosaurus, several million years before T. rex lived. By most estimates though not all , there were fewer kinds of dinosaurs by the...
Order Dermoptera
The dermopterans constitute the group of flying lemurs a confusing name since they are neither lemurs, nor do they fly. Only 2 species survive today the colugos Cynocepkalus of Southeast Asia, both strict vegetarians. These modern animals, less than 1 ft 30 cm long, can glide as far as 450 ft 137 m from tree to tree on outstretched skin membranes. It is assumed, though there is no direct evidence for this, that Mid-Paleocene and Early Eocene dermopterans could do likewise. There is some...
Theropod Giants and Feathered Dinosaurs
The story of predatory dinosaurs began during the early stages of dinosaur evolution with the appearance of the first theropods in the Late Triassic Epoch. By the Middle and Late Jurassic Epochs, the evolutionary lineages of meat-eating dinosaurs had diversified dramatically, leading in one direction to such large carnivores as Allosaurus Late Jurassic, western North America and in another direction to such small, chicken-sized insectivores as Compsogna-thus Late Jurassic, Germany . The Late...
Horned and BoneHeaded Dinosaurs
One of the most familiar images in the folklore of dinosaurs is a battle to the death between Tyrannosaurus and the horned dinosaur Triceratops Late Cretaceous, western North America . Triceratops was a large horned dinosaur, one of the last of its kind, and probably would have made a formidable foe for T. rex had the theropod been careless enough to engage it in a tussle. Weighing as much as 6 tons 5.4 tonnes , a defensive-minded Triceratops had many advantages to draw upon in battle. Its...
The Family Tree
The first reptiles descended from ancestral amphibians. They distinguished themselves from their ancestors through mutations that allowed them to free themselves from their dependence on water for reproduction. Among these adaptations, the amniotic egg stands out, but equally important were the development of sex organs that favored internal copulation, an impermeable skin, and the formation of a low volume of urine that eliminates uric acid instead of urea. These adaptations to its environment...
Sexual Dimorphism
Sexual dimorphism occurs when male and female individuals of a single species exhibit different anatomical traits. Such traits can be determined reliably in dinosaurs only when an abundance of specimens from the same species can be compared. Such traits helped dinosaurs distinguish male individuals of their species from females, and may have also been related to particular behaviors. For example, male African elephants have tusks, while females do not. These tusks are used during combat or...
What if anything is a reptile
Organisms are commonly classified according to the biological classification system, first developed by the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus 1707-1778 . His hierarchical system is the very famous or infamous ranking of groups of organisms in groups of decreasing size kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Individuals are generally referred to by italicized generic genus and specific species names, for example in the case of a famous large dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex. Any name...
Respiration in Varanids
Lung morphology. Varanids and helodermatids are the only lizards that possess multichambered lungs Perry, 1998 . They are generally large and heterogene-ously subdivided into various chambers, with the apical chambers supplied with inspired air through a cartilage-reinforced secondary bronchus Perry, 1998 . The dorso-medial region of the varanid lung is where the majority of gas exchange occurs via dense parenchyma, while the caudal sacculated sections are poorly vascularized, highly compliant...
What it looked like
Palaeontologists consider Bagaceratops to be far more primitive than the ceratopids - even though it came later than many of them. Like the ceratopids, Bagaceratops has a relatively stocky build and short legs. However, along with its horn, its crest is nowhere near as large as those of Styracosaurus sty-RAC-o-SORE-us nor is Bagaceratops itself anywhere near as big. Its closest relative is probably Protoceratops pro-toe-KAIR-ah-tops , which is about twice the size of its smaller cousin. With...
the bare bones
OW THAT WE'VE GOT all the bones back in the lab, what do we do with them Usually we put them in storage for a few years. Unlike wine, they don't get any better in the basement. But, like other paleontology museums, the Museum of the Rockies has a huge backlog of fossils waiting to be cleaned. And just because T. rex has the biggest fan club doesn't mean we can shove aside the preparation of other valuable study specimens when a T. rex comes in the door. We've got a waiting list for fossil...
Family Viverridae
This family of small carnivores contains the modern civets, genets and mongooses. The viverrids are among the oldest of the carnivores, with an ancestry dating back as far as the Middle Paleocene, about 60 million years ago. They are also among the most adaptable and least specialized of all carnivores. Viverrids are mostly long-bodied, short-legged animals. Many of them are opportunistic omnivores, eating a great variety of food from earthworms, mollusks, crabs, fish, birds and reptiles...
Phylum Arthropoda
Aquatic, terrestrial and aerial invertebrates, with a segmented body and jointed legs hence the name covered by chitin. Growth takes place through moults, so the chitin skeleton shows no growth lines. subphylum TRILOBITOMORPHA Cambrian to Permian In addition to the trilobites, this subphylum includes the class TRILOBITOIDEA, which are largely represented by fossils from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia. They appear to be a varied group, but to have similar appendages to...
Cretaceous Sauropods
The sauropod group Neosauropoda is subdivided into two major clades the Diplodocoidea comprising the Rebbachisauridae, Di-craeosauridae, and Diplodocidae and the Macronaria composed mainly of the Camarasauridae, Brachiosauridae, and Titanosauria . Of these, only the Macronaria had taxa that survived into the Early and Late Cretaceous Epochs as members of the brachiosaurs and titanosaurs. The Macronaria were distinguished from other sauro-pods by skull features that included a nasal opening that...
Fishes Large and Small
The big Xiphactinus swam effortlessly through the clear, warm waters of the Western Interior Sea in a solitary, never-ending search for its next meal. Ten years old and nearly four meters long, it had not yet reached full size, but it was already larger than any of the other species of fish in this ocean except the giant ginsu sharks. Although still wary of the occasional prowling shark, the X-fish's only other major competitor for the larger fish that it preyed upon were the large marine...
Lipp Alian
Grenville mountain belt, fully formed by a billion years ago, was exposed in a life-less continental interior to the forces of weathering and erosion. We know that by about 550 million years ago, an entire thickness of continental crust had been removed and erosion had exposed the roots of the ancient Grenville Mountains. Laurentia is the term geologists apply to the ancestral Paleozoic core of North America, lacking certain areas such as the present eastern seaboard region eastern...
Suborder Cryptodira
The cryptodires were the most successful group of chelonians, and survive to this day most modern turtles and tortoises belong to this group. Many of them can retract their heads into the shell by lowering the neck and pulling it back vertically. As a group, the cryptodires evolved along with their pleurodire cousins during Jurassic times. But by the end of that period they had become enormously diverse, and replaced the pleurodires in the seas, rivers and lakes of the world. New forms...
Fossilrange Chart Richmondian
Silurian limestone overlying Ordovicion unconformity 3rd coral zone FAVISTINA, LABE CHI A TE TRADIUM L epadocystis sp Calapoecia huronensis v Faustina slellala schyrodonta sp Homotrypa sp Silurian limestone overlying Ordovicion unconformity 2nd coral zone LABECHIA, TE T RADIUM Con stellaria polystome la Cyrtodontu a umbonata Ceraurus sp Homotrypa beds LABECHIA, TFTRADUJM- 1st coral zone large cephalopod fauna J Hebertella alveola Cyrtodontu o sp tschyrodonta elongala ' turkey track layer...
Missing link
Archaeopteryx was the first feathered dinosaur to be found anywhere. Originally, palaeontologists suggested it could be a major link between dinosaurs and birds, but now some think that Archaeopteryx is a bit of a dead end in avian evolution. It has feathers and light bones like birds do, but it also has a flat breastbone and a long, bony tail, which birds don't have. However, Archaeopteryx is some kind of link between feathered and non-feathered creatures and, as such, is a highly prized...
Family Calymenidae Burmeister 1
Subfamily Calymeninae Burmeister, 1843 CALYMENE Brongniart, 1822. Calymene breviceps Raymond, Waldron Shale, Silurian, Niagaran, Waldron, Indiana x2.6 . Gurley coll. of UCWM loaned by FMNH. Several complete individuals, rolled and unrolled. Calymene niagarensis Hall x2.8 . Racine Formation in the Niagaran Limestone, Silurian, McCook, Illinois RLS coll., id. now at FMNH . Negative mold encrusted with dolomite crystals. In spite of the coarse grain of the surface, anatomical details of the...
Chirostenotes Temnocheirus Cutting Hand
Warm forest, hills, desert, or plains Solitary or family 1-2 adults, 1-2 young a descendant of the original dinosaur Chirostenotes a beaked, bipedal omnivore with a short, bumplike horn on its beak, long and powerful clawed forearms, and a surprisingly short tail. Roughly the size of a black bear of Earth, Chirostenotes temnocheirus, the cutting hand, has turned its clawed forearms into lethal weapons, indeed. The lifestyle of this curious animal is a combination of the bear and the ostrich....
Preemptive Strike
If the Alvarez theory is correct, the change from Cretaceous time to Tertiary time happened instantaneously, everywhere around the globe, in which case the K-T boundary clay can represent but a mere eyeblink of geologic time a few hundred or a few thousand years at most. Furthermore, the boundary would have to be the same age everywhere. Officer and Drake claimed to have evidence that, on the contrary, the age of the boundary differs by hundreds of thousands of years at different locales. If...
Family Tapiridae
The family to which the modern tapirs belong, the Tapiridae, can be traced back as far as the Early Oligocene, about 40 million years ago. The 4 species of living tapirs are all placed in the single genus Tapirus. Two species occur in Central America and northern South America and 2 in Southeast Asia none remain in the group's original northern stronghold. This scattered relict distribution has often been cited as evidence for the existence of the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland. It is...
Bipedality and the Fully Erect Gait
The reason predatory dinosaurs became bipedal is not at all clear. The only thing that can be said in the end is that bipedalism was a serendipitously crucial adaptation The earliest known biped was the Early Triassic thecodont Euparkeria. Fig. 4A . Though normally quadrupedal, this small reptile was capable of shifting to a bipedal gait when moving quickly. In the Middle and Late Triassic, bipedality became increasingly common among the thecodonts and evolved independently in several lineages...
bibliography
Wherever possible I've relied on what other scientists tell me when it comes to describing other people's research. I grew up with undiagnosed dyslexia, and reading is not easy for me. Besides, scientific papers are pretty tough going, even for scientists. But I've included some papers that I've read among the publications I've consulted to help me with this book, just in case you're interested in looking through them. It is worth reading at least one scientific paper to see how a scientist...
MATERIALS AND METHODS Osteological Correlates of Known Skin Structures
Because ceratopsid horn cores and bosses are novel structures that have no direct homologs in extant taxa an extant phylogenetic bracket EPB level III inference per Witmer, 1995 , we compared these structures to convergent structures in extant taxa to address structural and functional relationships. A diverse group of extant amniotes comprising 96 specimens from 84 taxa was sampled to test relationships between skin structures and underlying bone morphology Table 1 . Convergent examples of...
Cladistics and the Fossil Record of Theropods
Critics of the hypothesis that birds are theropod dinosaurs have claimed that the stratigraphic record supports their view, by indicating that the relevant theropod taxa occur too late in time. Feduccia 1996 90 , for example, states, Birds are supposed to be derived from the coelurosaurian dinosaurs, and the form initially used to relate dinosaurs to birds, Deinonychus, is from the early Cretaceous, some 40 million years after Archaeopteryx, and the most birdlike dinosaurs are from the late...
Convergence
Fossils were at one time classified primarily by similarities of structure of the hard parts of organisms. This was found to be misleading as paleontologists discovered that some entirely unrelated creatures had developed similar structures, presumably because they were useful to different organisms that had adopted similar ways of life. This trick of nature, which Professor George Gaylord Simpson has called the bane of the taxonomist, is called convergence. Perhaps the most obvious example is...
Hesperornithes
The Hesperornithes were a highly specialized subgroup of aquatic ornithuromorphs. Also loonlike but probably all flightless, these large birds measured up to 3.3 feet 1 m long and were divers. There are about nine valid taxa of Hesperornithes and they are definitely known only from fossil localities in the Northern Hemisphere. The best-known hesperornithean is Hesperornis Late Cretaceous, western North America , for which several skulls and partial skeletons have been found. When it was first...