Exotic Canada Alberta: Dinosaur hunting

The National Post: Exotic Canada Alberta: Dinosaur hunting
Maryam Siddiqi

Hi, I’d like to go inside the dinosaur.” As soon as I’d said it, I knew it didn’t sound right. The mortified teenage boy behind the admissions counter knew it didn’t sound right, either, but there was no other way to put it — I wanted to climb the 106 steps inside the World’s Largest Dinosaur to get a sky-high view of Drumheller, Alta. At 86 feet high and 151 feet long, this particular beast is four times the size of the real Tyrannosaurus rex, but really, these are just mere details when you arrive at the top, emerge into the dino’s open mouth and take in the view of southern Alberta’s Badlands.

This particular T-rex is just one of many in Drumheller. And if you’re here, you’re here for dinosaurs. It’s just the way it is. Fossil stores and Reptile World, cuddly stuffed dinos and accurate toy replicas: Imagine it, and Drumheller’s got it. But I was here for the real deal, not “dinosaur droppings” (chocolate rosebuds), and so I headed to the region’s — the country’s, actually — foremost authority on these creatures, the Royal Tyrrell Museum. If anyone knew where I’d be able to find a genuine dinosaur, it would be these guys.

Having just celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, the museum is overflowing with dinosaur relics: 90% of its specimens are in storage. But what is on display is designed to impress — a thorough depiction of the world’s evolution, from Big Bang to Ice Age (complete with an exhibit devoted to Charles Darwin), that neither kids nor adults will tire of.

Most stunning is the Royal Tyrrell’s collection of various dinosaurs fossilized in their death poses. Heads thrown back, tails forward, legs bent tight, a haunting sense of agony pervades these fossilized creatures.

But I, too, died a little during this visit. I have long held a fascination with dinosaurs; it’s hard to wrap my head around their size and presence, how they cohabitated, their lifespans and lifestyles. Quickly, a few myths were busted.

First, the only creatures actually considered dinosaurs are those that traversed land. Pterodactyls? Flying lizards! I was shocked. Second, Jurassic Park wasn’t a documentary. (Spoiler alert!) The only thing that stopped me from crumpling backwards into my own death pose was the museum’s Preparation Lab.

Only a pane of glass separates visitors from the technicians as they prepare fossils for research and eventual display. The team endures a delicate and meticulous process to preserve as much bone as possible while separating it from the rocks in which it is found. The crew here works on fossils found in Alberta — the fossil record in the province is as vast as anywhere in the world, and paleontologists actively prospect here for dino gold during summer months. Just weeks before my visit, a dig crew at a Suncor mine in Fort McMurray unearthed a rare ankylosaur. If all goes as planned, the museum will have it on display in two years.

As I watched the technicians — hunched over, gloves on, hair pulled back, masks covering noses and mouths to prevent inhalation of million-year-old dust — a hush fell over the room. It was surgical theatre and it was entrancing.

Finally, I peeled myself away and headed to Dinosaur Hall, the largest display of dinos under one roof in Canada, including fossilized bones engraved with fossilized bite marks from other dinosaurs. I moved past creature after creature and eventually came to a replica bone bed — essentially a five-foot-long tray of earth packed with dino bones. I was told by one of the museum’s staff that that’s what one will find in nearby Dinosaur Provincial Park: “It’s like mecca for dinosaur enthusiasts.” Mecca? “You can drag your foot on the ground there and unearth fossils.” Excuse me?

If bones were so easy to find, that must mean there were creatures out there devouring them. The next morning, I headed two hours southeast of Drumheller, and my jaw dropped as the landscape did. Cresting the hill right after the main gate of Dinosaur Provincial Park, I grabbed my camera and jumped out of the car. This is as bad as the Badlands get, by which I mean the terrain here is fantastic. Over the course of millions and millions of years, an expanse of valley walls, hills and iconic hoodoos have been carved into the 80 square kilometres that make up this park, leaving us today with an undulating desert-like landscape. I climbed back in the car and headed to the Visitors’ Centre, soon passing a sign asking people not to stop their cars on the hill. Oops.

A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Dinosaur Provincial Park entices paleontologists, photographers and nature lovers to its unmatched grounds every summer. Still smarting a bit from my Mesozoic reality check the day before, I wondered why I seemed to be the only living thing traversing the park. If dinosaurs are so big, why can’t I see any? Or at least hear them? I stumbled into the Visitors’ Centre to present my query and was directed to their exhibits. More bones and diagrams and educated theories. Suddenly, it hit me, kind of like a meteor hitting Earth and killing every living thing on it. Dinosaurs are extinct! All that’s left are their fossils. My mood suddenly became as overcast as the sky outside. If dinosaurs are dead, then I’ll have to be satisfied with walking on their bones. Many, many lovely bones. I headed back out to the ever-evolving landscape at this park in hopes that it would perk me up.

And the park really is ever evolving. Layers upon layers of sandstone, mudstone, iron-stone and bentonite clay, susceptible to the effects of wind and water, grow and crumble perpetually. Run your hand along some sandstone, and you will have left your mark on the park as sand unpacks itself under your touch. On one visit, of course, you won’t be able to see the change, but the Visitors’ Centre has striking examples of hoodoos here one day, and gone the next (with 25 years in between).
Along with guided hikes and bus tours, there are five self-guided interpretive trails that visitors can amble along, each offering a different benefit — the Cottonwood Flats trail leads explorers through lush habitat along the Red Deer River, while the Coulee Viewpoint trail takes hikers to ridge tops for expansive views.

Unfortunately, my timing didn’t work out for the park’s bona fide bone bed excavations. On select dates over the course of the summer, groups of up to six people can take part in one-, two- or three-day digs led by a paleontological technician. After a park orientation, groups are led into a working quarry to prospect for fossils — on your knees, in the dirt, with the hot sun on your back. Any finds are then sent to the Royal Tyrrell for analysis.

“This is real science happening,” explained Brad Tucker, who launched the program two years ago. So while genuine, live dinosaurs are out of the question, a chance to contribute to what we know about these beasts, to interact with millions of years of history, well, it’s just as good as the real thing. (Safer, too.)

Scientists find dinosaurs had warm blood

The Wenatchee World: Scientists find dinosaurs had warm blood

LOS ANGELES — Millions of years after dinosaurs roamed the Earth, scientists have taken their temperature and reported that their bodies operated between 96.8 and 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

That temperature could mean that dinosaurs were warm-blooded like birds, their modern-day feathered descendants, the researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science. But it’s also possible that they were cold-blooded like the reptiles they resemble and that they developed large bodies that allow them to stay warm without requiring a huge investment in energy and metabolism, they said.

Either way, “if you walked up to a dinosaur, it would feel like a cow,” said John Eiler, a geologist and geochemist at Caltech and the study’s senior author.

To figure out their body temperature, Eiler and his colleagues relied on the fact that atoms tend to clump with other atoms of similar weight, and that the strength of those bonds depends on temperature. If the temperature is low, the atoms will bond tightly; if the temperature is high, the bonds will be weaker.

The research team examined fossilized teeth from large sauropods from multiple sites during the Jurassic period, which ended about 145 million years ago. They focused on the enamel because it was much better preserved than other parts of the teeth.

By zeroing in on the ratio of heavy carbon bonded to heavy oxygen, the scientists were able to calculate that the creatures were quite warm, as warm as modern-day birds and mammals.

“The technique is rather elegant,” said John Harris, chief curator of the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study.

The question of whether dinosaurs regulated their own body temperatures or were dependent on heat from the environment has been a matter of scientific debate for decades.

Until the 1960s, they were presumed to be cold-blooded. But more recently, evidence about their anatomy, habitat, growth rate and behavior has emerged, suggesting that they might be warm-blooded.

While the study doesn’t settle this controversy, it does provide scientists with a new avenue to pursue questions related to animal evolution and the development of warm-blooded creatures.

Eiler said he plans to study the teeth of sauropod dwarfs and other small dinosaurs to see if their body temperatures were lower than the dinos in this study.

If so, he said, that would suggest that the bigger dinosaurs used their size — rather than an internal thermostat — to stay warm.

Dinosaur-era feather colors revealed

Science Fair: Dinosaur-era feather colors revealed
High-tech X-rays point to the feather colors of some of the oldest-known birds, reports a study looking back at the Age of Dinosaurs.

Released by the journal Science, the study led by Roy Wogelius of the United Kingdom's University of Manchester looks at avian fossils found in Chinese bone beds dating to more than 105 million years ago. The species, Confuciusornis sanctus, is the oldest known beaked bird.

"Feather color in birds stems mostly from chemical pigments, of which the most widely used are melanins. Resolving color patterns in extinct species may hold the key to understanding selection processes that acted during crucial evolutionary periods and also may help discern non-flight functions such as camouflage, communication, and sexual selection," begins the study.

Recent studies have uncovered ancient feather colors based upon molecular shapes of these wing color melanins. But in the new study, the team takes the analysis step further, analyzing them with X-rays that reveal their chemistry, in particular trace metals such as copper that lead to coloration, so-called 'eumelanin' pigments tied today to dark colors in creatures' feathers, fur and hair.

"This is a pigment that evolved a very, very long time ago but is still actively synthesized by organisms on the planet, and we found a way to map it and show its presence over 120 million years of geological time passing," said Wogelius, in a statement. "It is a direct relationship between you, me, and some extremely old organisms."

So, what did the find? "Trace metals in C. sanctus are high in the downy feathers," says the study. Flight feathers don't show as much pigment, suggesting they were white. "This suggests that Confuciusornis sanctus most probably had darkly shaded regions, with the most intense eumelanin pigmentation in the downy body feathers," concludes the study.

Scientists say they may have found a way to see dinosaurs in living color

Philly.com: Scientists say they may have found a way to see dinosaurs in living color

By detecting the faintest remnants of pigments on two bird fossils that date back more than 100 million years, scientists say they may have found a technique to add color to the age of the dinosaurs.

Fossils give scientists a good image of the shapes, sizes, and even, from inference, the motion of long-extinct animals. But the colors and patterns adorning those creatures was anybody's guess.

As part of an international collaboration, paleontologists from the University of Pennsylvania used intense beams of X-rays to detect remnants of a dark pigment called eumelanin in two ancient bird fossils from China. They announced their findings Friday in the journal Science.

Coloring the past will do more than just improve the accuracy of museum displays and dinosaur movies. Across the living world, creatures use color for camouflage, to signal their species and sex, to advertise their toxicity to predators, or to show off to potential mates.

They undoubtedly did so in the past as well.

"So far we've been living in a black-and-white world," said Luis Chiappe, a paleontologist from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not part of the team. "Now we can get a sense of the colors of dinosaurs and other extinct animals."

The project brought together paleontologists, geochemists, and physicists through a bit of serendipity that started when a fossil hunter in North Dakota heard a report on NPR. The segment was about some physicists who had used an X-ray generator called a synchrotron to help decipher a 2,200-year-old text - the oldest surviving writing of Archimedes.

The original writing had mostly been painted over. But physicists found a way to read it with the synchrotron by the way that the X-rays it generated interacted with atoms of iron in the original ink used by the Greek engineer and mathematician.

Natural pigments from living things also incorporate heavy metals. If any had somehow stuck with the fossils, perhaps the high-intensity X-rays could find them as well.

There was already some circumstantial evidence for the existence of pigments in extinct birds, said team member Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester, England, who is now on sabbatical at Penn.

The group that did that work, based at Yale University, used a scanning electron microscope to map out remnants of cells, called melanocytes, in 100-million-year-old fossil imprints of feathers. These structures serve as minuscule paint pots that hold pigments, Manning said.

In 2008, the Yale team reported that the melanocytes were arranged in striking bands.

Manning and his colleagues thought they could go further, deciphering the actual chemistry of the pigments. "They could find the containers but they couldn't analyze their contents," he said of the previous finding.

The idea to use a synchrotron to analyze fossils began when the paleontologist who heard the NPR report, Pete Larson, got in touch with physicist Uwe Bergmann, who had worked on the Archimedes text at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif.

"I thought immediately it would be possible to learn something because of the sensitivity of this technique," said Bergmann.

The synchrotron is a type of particle accelerator, similar to those used to create exotic subatomic particles. The one in this study accelerates electrons around an oval tube nearly 800 feet in circumference. The acceleration of the electrons generates X-rays, which can be focused on a small target.

The fossils are analyzed in tiny segments, said Bergmann, a process that took between eight and 12 hours and had to be done with exquisite care to avoid damaging the specimen.

The atoms of different metals absorb and reemit X-rays at very specific frequencies, he said, allowing scientists to trace the patterns of iron, copper, calcium, and other elements.

"You can get images and maps that you overlay . . . and by doing that you start to re-create the composition of what is left from the original animals," said Bergmann. In a sense, he said, "you bring the fossil back to life."

The first sample the paleontologists tried was of a primitive bird called Archaeopteryx, which lived during the Jurassic era and had teeth rather than a beak. Though the fossil looked like a mere impression, the synchrotron revealed some traces of sulfur and phosphorus that the scientists think made up part of the original feathers.

But there were limits to what they could see in Archaeopteryx, said Manning, because when the fossil was discovered in the 1800s, it had been brushed, hard, likely removing most of the remaining organic matter.

So they brought in two fossils that had not been brushed and included well-preserved imprints of feathers. One was a bird called Confuciusornis sanctus, which lived 120 million years ago and represents one of the first birds to have a beak rather than teeth. Manning describes it as similar to a modern magpie.

The other bird, called Gansus yumensis, is 110 million years old and looked like a modern grebe.

The first element that the scientists looked for with the synchrotron was copper, which is typically present in the dark pigment eumelanin. It adds darkness to blacks, browns, and similar colors. Copper was indeed concentrated in the feather imprints of the fossil birds.

Going a step further, the scientists were able to study the patterns of X-rays that were reemitted from the fossils to get information about the other atoms that were bound to the copper. That revealed that the copper was incorporated into organic compounds similar to those associated with eumelanin in living animals.

That gives them strong evidence that the copper didn't come from the rock surrounding the bird but most likely was part of a pigment, said the paper's lead author, Roy Wogelius, a geochemist at the University of Manchester. "The copper chemistry in these preserved pigments is extremely similar to melanin we've sampled from living organisms."

The copper-containing compounds may have survived so long because they are so toxic, he said, and thus were not consumed by microorganisms.

The next step will be to try to detect other pigments beyond eumelanin, Wogelius said: "There just may be some hints of some other chemicals that give us the full color palette."

Dinosaurs were animal world's top bone heads

BBC News Science and Environment: Dinosaurs were animal world's top bone heads
Scientists have compared a dinosaur with several modern-day animals to settle who wins the heavy-weight head-butting title.

The new findings confirm that the ancient bipedal dinosaur Stegoceras could knock out any of today's top head-butters.

Stegoceras probably used their domed skulls to ram each other over access to fertile females.

The hard-hitting research was published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Stegoceras was a member of the leaf-eating genus Pachycephalosauria that roamed the Earth around 70 million years ago.

The goat-sized dinosaur supported a 7.5cm (~3 inches) thick bony skull, which some palaeontologists believe acted as a shock-absorber when these animals ran at each other.

Big hitters

However, images of the insides of Stegoceras' fossilised skull, which reveal two layers of dense bone that encase a spongy sinus held apart by tiny struts, has led some scientists to doubt this interpretation.

Stegoceras likely ran at each other at 15 miles per hour. Hoping to clear up the controversy, biomedical engineer Dr Eric Snively wandered down the corridor at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada to enlist the help of colleague Dr Jessica Theodor, a vertebrate palaeontologist.

The duo performed computer tomographic (CT) scans on the skulls of Stegoceras, along with a variety of modern animals, and used these bone density measurements to create 3D models of the animals' heads.

The team was then able to exert virtual stresses to test how the different skulls held up.

Compared to some of today's big hitters, such as the Northern American bighorn sheep, the Arctic musk ox and African duiker, Stegoceras ' head was able to withstand the most stress.

"The argument that they couldn't withstand the forces of head-butting seems to have been refuted by this evidence," said Dr Theodor.

Crushing collisions

Dr Snively explained that if two animals ran at each other with a combined speed of 6.7 metres (22 feet) per second, which he estimates to be a realistic speed, Stegoceras' dome-head would have had to withstand an impact of over 13,000 Newtons (2,918 pounds-force).

"In human terms, that's like balancing a Ford Focus on your head," Dr Snively told BBC News.

"Even at these forces, only a few struts of bone might break; these would heal easily," he said.

Offering further protection from these crushing collisions, Stegoceras' head was covered by a layer of keratin, the material nails are made from, and articulations between the vertebrae would have let the "backbone scrunch up like an accordion", explained Dr Snively.

Study indicates that dinosaurs were warm, though maybe not warm-blooded

The Washington Post: Study indicates that dinosaurs were warm, though maybe not warm-blooded

Scientists have figured out a way to take the temperature of dinosaurs, and it turns out that theirs was almost the same as ours.

Of course, you can’t just stick a thermometer under the tongue of a gigantic creature that’s been extinct for millions of years. So they did the next best thing. They studied dinosaur teeth, which can reflect body temperature.

They found the long-necked brachiosaurus had a temperature of about 100.8 degrees , and the smaller camarasaurus had a temperature of about 98.3 degrees. People average 98.6.

But their findings, reported online in the journal Science, won’t settle the debate over whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded.

When dinosaurs were first discovered, the theory was that they were lumbering and cold-blooded, but in recent years the consensus has been moving more toward warm-blooded, which would have allowed them to be more active, like the velociraptors in the “Jurassic Park” movies.

“Our analysis really allows us rule out that they could have been cold, like crocodiles, for example,” lead researcher Robert A. Eagle of the California Institute of Technology said in a briefing.

But, he added, “this doesn’t necessarily mean these large dinosaurs had high metabolism like mammals and birds . . . they could have been ‘gigantotherms’ and stayed warm because they were so large.”

A giant body mass is very good at keeping the temperature constant, explained co-author Thomas Tuetken of the University of Bonn in Germany.

Their research was on sauropods, the largest of dinosaurs, and the researchers explained that animals that large can retain body heat even with a relatively low metabolism, simply because they are so big. Brachiosaurus weighed in at 40 tons and camarasaurus was a 15-ton creature. Both lived about 150 million years ago.

The finding “confirms that dinosaurs were not sluggish, cold-blooded animals,” commented Roger Seymour of the University of Adelaide in Australia, who was not part of the research team.

But, he added, “the debate about dinosaur metabolic rate will go on, no doubt, because it can never be measured directly, and paleoscientists will often seek evidence to support a particular view and ignore contrary evidence.”

Geoffrey F. Birchard of George Mason University agreed that the debate is likely to continue.

The new paper helps confirm what the temperatures of these dinosaurs were, but knowing what the temperature was in something so big doesn’t necessarily confirm that it was warm-blooded, said Birchard, who was not part of the research team.

The researchers were able to determine the creatures’ temperatures because body temperature affects the amount of different types of carbon and oxygen that collect in the tooth enamel.

Now that they’ve looked at the biggest ones, they plan to turn their attention to smaller dinosaurs.

MSU researchers say small Asian dinosaur actually a juvenile tyrannosaur, not separate species

Montana State University: MSU researchers say small Asian dinosaur actually a juvenile tyrannosaur, not separate species

BOZEMAN -- New research from Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies is helping unravel the evolutionary history of the iconic tyrannosaurid dinosaurs, according to MSU scientists who reviewed past findings about a small dinosaur from Asia.

The small-bodied tyrannosaur named Raptorex kriegsteini - about 10 feet long -- was named in 2009 by University of Chicago professor Paul Sereno and colleagues, and was described as having originated during the Lower Cretaceous of China, around 130 million years ago. The Raptorex was important because it seemed to show that characteristic features of tyrannosaurids, such as the short two-fingered arms, were acquired some 50 million years before previously thought. As a result, Tyrannosaurus was relegated to being just a particularly large, brutish version of a much older body plan.

However, Museum of the Rockies researcher Denver Fowler and colleagues showed in a paper published June 29 in the journal PLoS One that key supporting evidence was misinterpreted by the original Raptorex authors, and that the old ideas might not have been so wrong after all.

"No one knows precisely where the Raptorex skeleton was dug up, because it was collected illegally and smuggled out of Asia" Fowler said. "The age and location stated had to be inferred from fossils found with the skeleton.

"Basically, the entire age assessment boils down to a single fish vertebra, which was misidentified as belonging to Lycoptera: a species from 130 million years ago. However, the morphology is actually very different," Fowler said.

The MSU scientists said other essential details of the original description were also misinterpreted.

"Raptorex was justified as a new small-bodied species because thin sections of the limb bones were supposed to show that it was a small-bodied adult or subadult," Fowler continued, "But we looked at the images published by Sereno et al., and the story just didn't fit."

The researchers found that the Raptorex specimen was a juvenile, and still growing rapidly when it died, Fowler said.

"All these clues pointed to the fact that 'Raptorex' was actually a juvenile of a large-bodied Late Cretaceous species rather than an adult from the Early Cretaceous. It looks almost identical to a juvenile Tarbosaurus bataar recently described from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia, suggesting that it is either also a Tarbosaurus bataar, or another closely related species," Fowler said.

He added that a more serious side to the research is that the type specimen was due to be repatriated to China, from which it was assumed to have been stolen, but actually it is more likely the specimen was illegally removed from neighboring Mongolia.

"One of my coauthors spoke to the original seller of the specimen and he told us it was sold as a juvenile Tarbosaurus from Mongolia," Fowler said. "I do not know where the idea came from that it was Chinese."

"This highlights the problems of dealing with stolen specimens that have none of the essential data," Fowler said.

The MSU research used new "Unified Frames of Reference" analytical methods devised by Jack Horner, Regents Professor of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and co-author on the paper. Fowler said this holistic approach is facilitating great leaps in paleontologists' ability to classify dinosaurs, and reveal evolution patterns.

"We're really only beginning to understand the severe changes that dinosaurs went through as they grew up, and this means that many skeletons of young or especially old animals are being described as new species, when they are actually just growth stages of already recognized species," Fowler said.

"It is important that we get the taxonomy of dinosaurs correct because all subsequent research is dependent on this," he continued. "What our research shows is that the old hypothesis about tyrannosaurs gradually acquiring their unique characteristics is correct or is yet to be falsified."

Other co-authors on the paper were Holly Woodward and Elizabeth Freedman of the Museum of the Rockies and MSU's Department of Earth Sciences, and Peter Larson from the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, Inc., and the University of Manchester in Britain.