I Love Dinosaurs

Chat with Dr. Phil Currie

2007-07-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the cool folks over at discoverychannel.ca for creating an opportunity to visit with Dr. Phil Currie at his current dig at Alberta's Dry Island Park. Along with many other dino enthusiasts, we got to ask Dr. Currie a question:

Hi Dr. Currie, What is the oldest (ancestral) tryannosaurid found so far and where was it found?

His Answer: Dear Dinokids (& mom). The oldest tyrannosaurids known are from China and come from two different places...
Guanlong is a late Jurassic crested form, while Dilong

is a feathered form that is about the size of a German shepherd. Phil - 07:07:26 9:34 pm ET

Thanks Dr. Currie!!

More about the Horseshoe Canyon Formation

2007-02-10T18:56:00.000-08:00

Who originally discovered the Horseshoe Canyon Formation fossil sites?

(Our thanks to Dr. Will Strait for this information)
In 1884 a coal geologist named Joseph Tyrrell found a skull of a tyrannosaur (probably Albertosaurus) in the rocks around Drumheller. He wasn't looking for fossils, but he knew what he was looking at and took the skull back to his colleagues. Organized collecting of the fossils in the area began in 1898, and during the first two decades of the 20^th Century, several important paleontologists came to the area, including Lawrence Lambe, the Sternbergs (a father & two-son team), and Barnum Brown. Several museums around the world got specimens from the Drumheller area during those years. After a lull in collecting, some new initiatives in the 1950s and again in the 1980s resulted in the opening of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller in 1985. Since then, although more work has been done in Dinosaur Provincial Park to the south, the badlands around Drumheller have been almost continuously searched for fossils.

Two-headed marine reptile found

2007-01-21T12:37:00.000-08:00

A fossil of a two-headed marine reptile called a Hyphalosaurus has been found in China. It looks like a mini-plesiosaur with two heads. It was discovered in North-eastern China by Eric Buffetaut and a team from France and China. It lived in the early Cretaceous about 120 million years ago. It is the first fossil ever found that shows two long necks and two heads. This is called axial bifurcation and is found in modern reptiles. Researchers were surprised to find this in a fossil. The Hyphalosaurus was three inches long and a hatchling. Adults would be about a metre long (three feet).

Hyphalosaurus is part of a larger group of aquatic and semi-aquatic reptiles called choristoderes and was not a true dinosaur.

The fossil was found in the Yixian formation that is famous for giving us many fossils of feathered dinosaurs, like Caudipteryx and birds.

We think it is really cool and maybe it started stories of two-headed dragons.

Dr. Will on finding fossils in Horseshoe Canyon

2006-12-21T11:00:00.000-08:00

How did I find fossils in the Horseshoe Canyon Formation?

Some years ago, I was a graduate student who needed a project. My advisors put me in contact with curators at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, who wanted to know if the stacking of sedimentary layers in the Horseshoe Canyon Formation followed a pattern. I spent two summers measuring the thickness of rock layers, noting which types of rocks they were and whether they contained fossils, along a 45-km stretch of the Red Deer River around Drumheller. What I learned was that the rock layers do follow a pattern, but the dinosaur fossils also follow a pattern.

I had a lot of help with the work, particularly during the fossil hunts. Jon and Patty, also paleontologists, helped me find and identify bones while we were out searching. We examined the records at the museum to locate places around the badlands that had not been collected before. Then we checked to find out who owned the land; if someone owned the land, we asked permission from the landowner before starting our fossil hunt on private property. We'd get all our gear together—hat, bugspray, gloves, water and lunch, first aid kit, raincoat, notebook, camera, and rock hammer—and drive out to the spot we'd chosen. Together, we made some important new discoveries, some of which I put in Picture #3 (above).

In one spot, we found a place where a very hard layer of sandstone had made a "bench"—a wide flat spot—exposing dozens of hadrosaur bones. The Museum later conducted a major excavation at this spot. Jon was particularly good at finding tyrannosaur teeth, which we needed for the chemistry study I described last time. Patty found a section of a whole dinosaur, bones all jumbled into a pile. I found a jaw from a baby tyrannosaur. Over the eleven weeks of our fossil hunts, Jon and Patty and I found hundreds of dinosaur bones. Our most important find was not a dinosaur at all, but a cluster of fossil leaves! One of the curators at the museum told me that dinosaurs are very common out there, but plant fossils are rare—and they are still collecting plants at that site today.

Dr. Will on how to find fossils

2006-12-13T18:31:00.000-08:00

What does a paleontologist need to know to go out and find fossils?

You probably know that dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic, a period of time that started on the first day of the Triassic about 225 million years ago and ended with last day of the Cretaceous about 65 million years ago. If you search for fossils in rocks that are older than the Triassic—in rocks from the Permian, which might be 280 million years old—you might find fossil fish or bones from the pelycosaurs we discussed last time, but you won't find dinosaurs because the rocks aren't the right age. Rocks younger than 65 million years old might contain fossil horses, but again no dinosaurs. In order to find dinosaur fossils, you need to know the age of the rocks you're hunting in.

Paleontologists use a special type of map called a Geologic Map that shows roads and cities (like other maps) but also the age of surface rock. Picture #1 (above) includes a section of a geologic map of Alberta, made by the Alberta Geologic Survey; on this map, you can see several swirls of color, each with bold labels: "Khc", "Kbp", and "Ks" are examples. In each case, the "K" means Cretaceous—so the rocks around Drumheller, the city closest to the Tyrrell Museum, are the right age to contain dinosaurs. However, even though a rock is the right age, it may still not be the right kind of rock to contain dinosaurs.

Rocks come in three general types, and only one type preserves fossils. Igneous rocks are melted deep inside the earth and sometimes erupt through volcanoes but are too hot to preserve fossils. Metamorphic rocks are very old rocks that have been deeply buried; they get squeezed and cooked and changed, but they're too far down to collect bones. Sedimentary rocks, which are made from sand and mud stirred at the surface by wind and water, can capture and keep old bones. These rocks come in layers, almost like a stack of pancakes. When sliced open by a river, the stack of layers is exposed, as shown in the photos in Picture #1 (above). The geologic map will show you where you can find sedimentary rocks.

Each layer of sedimentary rocks, usually called a formation, has a special name, also shown by the geologic map. You might have already guessed that the "hc" part of "Khc" stands for the "Horseshoe Canyon" Formation. "Kbp" represents the Bearpaw Formation, and "Ks" represents the Scollard Formation. Each layer is a bit different—there are lots of different kinds of sedimentary rocks too! On the map, the colors don't seem to make a stack, but that's because the hills and valleys are eroded and lumpy, as shown by Picture #2 below.

We're back!

2006-12-13T17:58:00.000-08:00

Hi everybody!
Our Mom got a bit overwhelmed and we were really busy with having fun outside and then with back to school time, but now we are back with new adventures.

We are excited about starting to plan our trip to the Royal Tyrrell Museum next summer. We are starting to learn about all of the things that we will see on our way there. We are also starting to learn about the geology and stratigraphy (the layers of rock and earth that are formed at different times in the planet's history) of that area so we will know where to look for fossils when we get there.

Dr. Will has sent us more great information and pictures. We will work on that post now.

Thanks to all of you who have sent us messages. We really appreciate you visiting us! And we enjoyed our visit to Adventure Boy's site too! We really liked the picture of the Hadrosaur. We thought it was a Muttabarrasaurus because of the crest on its snout. And we also liked the lions by the cave.

Terrific Thylacines

2006-07-09T09:54:00.001-07:00

We have really been enjoying visiting the Thylacine Museum. Even though Thylacines aren't dinosaurs, they are prehistoric. They were marsupials (like kangaroos and koalas) that originated in the late Pleistocene (about 10,000 years ago) and existed in Tasmania until 1936 when the last known Thylacine died in captivity. They were also known as the Tasmanian Tiger.

We are sad that people killed all of the Thylacines. There are some scientists who are hoping they can make a clone of a Thylacine and bring them back. Just like some others are hoping to bring back Mammoths. We hope that they will be successful.

The Thylacine Museum has lots of pictures, information and even some movies!!

Canadian fossil important new find

2006-04-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

Tiktaalik roseae

Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a species that provides the missing evolutionary link between fish and the first animals that walked out of water onto land about 375 million years ago. The newly found species, Tiktaalik roseae, has a skull, a neck, ribs and parts of the limbs that are similar to four-legged animals known as tetrapods, as well as fish-like features such as a primitive jaw, fins and scales.

A model of a newly discovered species, Tiktaalik roseae, that fills in the evolutionary gap between fish and land animals, depicted in what scientists believe to be the animal's environment about 375 million years ago. (Model by Tyler Keillor, Photo by Beth Rooney)

These fossils, found on Ellesmere Island in Arctic Canada, are the most compelling examples yet of an animal that was at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition. The new find is described in two related research articles highlighted on the cover of the April 6, 2006, issue of Nature.

The full article is here.

Meet Dr. Will

2006-04-14T21:25:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody. Mom apologizes for the long absence. We have a really special treat for you today. We would like to introduce you to Dr. Will Straight. He is a vertebrate paleontologist at Yale University. He has offered to answer some of our questions about dinosaurs and he sent us some really cool pictures. Here is his introduction:

You folks in Canada have some of the best dinosaur fossils in the world. I have been lucky to work with the Royal Tyrrell Museum on tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs from Alberta for about ten years. Right now I am working at Yale University in New Haven studying the way dinosaurs healed if they broke a bone. I have attached a few pictures I have taken of fossils--there is an Allosaur skull, a jaw and teeth from a Tyrannosaurus rex that paleontologists named Stan, and an Albertosaurus tooth I found in Alberta.

We asked Dr. Will some questions and he sent us some awesome answers. Here we go!

Let's start with your questions. Your first one--Do dinosaur bones heal like our bones?--is tricky. You see, we don't know. That's why I'm working on this problem. I can say that the way they get injured--being broken from a fall or a fight, or getting an infection, or getting a disease like cancer--seems to be about the same. Their bones form large rough bony crusts to cover injured spots, just like ours; these bony crusts are called calluses, and they last a few years while the injury finishes healing. I have attached a picture of a hadrosaur (probably Edmontosaurus) specimen with a callus on it; this bone is a spine (called a process) that sticks up from a vertebra (part of the spinal column) that was a few vertebra behind the hips. This process got broken in the middle, near the white arrow. There are lots of different ways of making these calluses when a bone gets injured; and at least some of our data shows that dinosaur bone healing (and its growth) *are* different than in people. We want to know how different the dinosaur bone repair is, and why.

Then we wanted to know what the skulll was in the background of the picture of Stan the T-Rex's jaw. Can you see it? It reminded us of a cynodont.

You are off to a good start with your guess that the skull in Stan's picture is a cynodont. The skull in the picture is a model of a skull from a pelycosaur called Dimetrodon. Pelycosaurs and cynodonts were, however, closely related--the pelycosaurus are Permian ancestors of the therapsids and thus also ancestors of the cynodonts, the group that eventually produced modern mammals and us. Dimetrodon and the cynodonts share some of the same structures in their skulls, so it isn't surprising they look similar.

Then Mom had a question. She thought that Dr. Will's work with paleo climate looked really interesting...

Now Mom's comment. One kind of geochemistry I do involves the oxygen in water. Look at the second picture I sent--this diagram will help here. Water falls as rain; the rain fills rivers and ponds; the dinosaurs (or other animals) drink; their drinking water enters their bloodstream; and the bone and teeth are made of a mineral called apatite that gets its oxygen from the bloodstream. This many-step exchange may not take very long, a few hours or days, but the local climate (how hot and wet it is) can change the oxygen chemistry in the water even more rapidly, and always in the same way. So, whenever the dinosaur makes new bone or makes a little tooth enamel, it's taking a chemical "snapshot" of the environment. If we can string these snapshots together, we can detect change in the climate over time. The way dinosaur teeth grow allows us to do just that--their teeth grow in cone-shaped layers, one layer per day, like an upside-down stack of paper cups. Big carnivores like Albertosaurus (a type of small tyrannosaur) have a year or more of those daily layers, so I can get a whole year of the climate story. This research means I have to grind up parts of the dinosaur tooth, so museums are reluctant to give me a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth for research, but I could get three years of a climate record there.

Thanks Dr. Will we can't wait to ask you some more questions. Maybe you could help us answer our friend Raffi's questions? Chat soon,
The dinokids!

Some good questions from Samuel

2006-03-24T10:22:00.000-08:00

We recieved a very nice email from Samuel Roy. In it he asked some good questions about dinosaurs:

Do you know where they came from? Can you tell me why we can't see them anymore? I think it would be cool to see a dinosaur, don't you? How old is the oldest dinosaur by the way?

We aren't experts, but this is what we think so far. Dinosaurs evolved from early lizards (reptiles) like Ichthyostega. (The picture is from Early Tetrapod Research at Cambridge University, UK.)

The oldest dinosaur we know of is Herrerasaurus (235 million years) followed closely by Eoraptor (228 million years).

We can't see dinosaurs today because they went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago. No one really knows what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. A lot of scientists think that a huge comet hit the earth and caused it. But our mom read an article the other day by a scientist who studies ancient pollen and he said that there seemed to be some really bad things happening even before the comet. There was a lot less pollen around for quite a while before the comet. And she explained to us that it probably means the plants that the dinosaurs ate were having a hard time growing. (Sorry, mom forgot to furl the article. If anyone knows the link, i'd love to include it.)

There are some animals that were around with the dinosaurs that we can still see today--the Tuatara of New Zealand is one. It has been around pretty much unchanged for 225 million years.

Others are crocodiles, sea turtles and sharks.

And, yes, we think it would be really cool to see a dinosaur.

A new blog to add to our roll!

2006-03-23T23:10:00.000-08:00

Fellow dino fan afarensis just pointed us to a great blog about fossils of all sorts called Transitions: The Evolution of Life. You've got to check it out!

And the life-size model of T-Rex at the Boston Museum of Science looks really awesome. We hope we get to visit it someday, too! Thanks Phobos for telling us about it!

Alligator or Crocodile

2006-03-23T22:13:00.000-08:00

We have been having lots of fun learning about Alligators and Crocodiles and we wanted to share the answer to the question we hear most adults asking. How can you tell the difference between an alligator and a crocodile?

In a crocodile the fourth tooth on the lower jaw is visible. But the full answer in colour with lots pictures is here at Alligators vs. Crocodiles. There is a fantastic guide available from Environment Canada here. It is prepared for customs officers who have to help protect all of the endangered species of crocodilians. It shows how to identify all the different species of alligators, crocodiles, caimans, and gharials. We didn't know there were so many.

And we really like this site, Crocodilians: Natural History. It has all sorts of great facts, pictures, and even movies of crocodiles. Their links page is a great resource for learning anything you might want to know about crocs.

Crocodiles are living dinosaurs. They have been around since the Late Triassic (about 225 million years ago). There is a neat site called The Archosauria that has info about the ancient crocodile ancestors.

We got interested in crocodilians again because we got to pet one at a show recently put on by Safari Jeff and Safari Shannon from Great Green Adventures. One of our other favourite Crocodilian shows is with Chris and Martin Kratt and Zoboomafoo.

A Russian Dinosaur discovered!

2006-03-03T00:22:00.000-08:00

a dino in Moscow, originally uploaded by raffi_1970.

This is our friend Raffi's T-Rex. Rrrroooaaarrr! We love it!

The amazing fossils of Messel

2006-03-02T23:39:00.000-08:00

We went to a talk by paleontonlogist Graham Beard last weekend. He talked and showed us lots of slides about the fossils people are digging up at a place called Messel, in Germany. It is a World Heritage site. We were really interested in the bugs, opposums, bats, turtles, crocodilians, and cute little mammals that they are finding. We also liked being able to touch the fossils and animal skeletons that he brought.

The book about Messel is called, Messel: The Pompeii of Paleontology. (We think, we will correct this if we are wrong.) You might be able to find it at your local library.

Here are some sites where you can learn more about these amazing fossils. Some of them are in German, but the pictures are great.

A site that tells you a bit about the fossils and the site. (Some of the links on this page don't work.)

The Fossil Museum site is really neat and has a page on Messel.

Site of the Messel research team.

An article from Science Daily about the possible causes of the mass deaths at Messel.

Breaking News from our friends

2006-02-26T10:34:00.000-08:00

Hi! Our friends Pippa and Judy and their mom, Elizabeth sent us these great sites. We cant' wait to explore them and tell you how we liked them. Maybe you could visit them and let us know what you think!

Breaking news for dino-kids! There may have been much more mammal life co-existing with dinosaurs than scientists first thought --

Jurassic Beavers co-existing with dinosaurs

CBC site -- may be fun has printables

a visit to Drumheller, Alberta

Two Museum of Nature paleontologists investigate how accurate Disney's Dinosaur movie is.

A look at rare Spinosauraus skeleton, with facts

If you can play movies you can Walk the Chasmosaur

Good Canadian source mentioning some early fossil-hunters

Today we are going to hear a real Paleontologist talk about fossils!
We'll let you know all about it next time.

Our visit to Courtenay Museum

2006-02-21T17:58:00.000-08:00

Tylosaurus
Originally uploaded by OGeorge.

This is a picture of a Tylosaurus, a relative of the Mosasaur. It was created by Olduvai George (artist, Carl Buell).

Last week we went to Courtney Museum. We saw an Elasmosaur (here's a photo of it) and a Mosasaur and a lungfish. We also saw some cards with drawings from other kids who had visited them too. Their website has a great page for kids with cool jigsaw puzzles and the story of a girl named Heather Trask who found the elasmosaur with her dad.

We read a news story today about how a paleontologist thinks that plesiosaurs ate bottom living creatures like clams and snails. They found the undigested bits of food still in its guts. They think that it used the gastroliths in its stomach to grind up the shells.

Exploring Olduvai George

2006-02-18T14:06:00.000-08:00

M. columbi layer 2
Originally uploaded by OGeorge.

Today we spent a couple of hours exploring the blog of Olduvai George, or illustrator, Carl Buell. We really enjoyed seeing how he made his mammoth. It was cool to see the different stages.

We also went and visited the blog of his new friend, Carl Brest Van Kempen, Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding. We enjoyed his pictures, too. Especially the frogs.

Our favourite paleontologist--Paul Sereno

2006-02-17T22:34:00.000-08:00

The first video we ever saw about a paleontologist was the National Geographic special "I Love Dinosaurs", which showed Paul Sereno digging up Jobaria. We really loved the part where he went to the Bowmanville Zoo and worked with Angus the elephant. We loved it so much that when we went to Ontario last summer, we got our Gramma to take us to visit Angus. He was amazing. We are so glad that he has gone to Africa to be with other really big elephants (Mom's note: they don't know, don't tell them, please!).

We visited Paul Sereno's site today and really liked it! We visited all the dinosaurs he has discovered. We liked all of them except Sarcosuchus, the Super Croc. It scared us too much and we wouldn't let our mom watch the cool movie. (Darn! says mom...)

We also checked out Project Exploration that was started by Paul Sereno and his wife Gabrielle Lyons. It looks like they have some really cool things for kids to do. We'll have to visit it again and read some of the reports by kids on what they did.

We'd like to visit Paul Sereno one day. We think he is really cool.

Our first post

2006-02-13T18:11:00.000-08:00

We found this cool post about Spinosaurus and a longer article here. It turns out that Spinosaurus may have been a lot bigger than T-Rex.