Discovering dinosaurs in the field

I’ve already written a bit about the fieldtrip to Alberta from this Autumn that I led from Queen Mary with a team of colleagues and undergraduates where we had a great time and found some great stuff. My friend and colleague Rob Knell was with us as pseudo-official photographer and he also had video capacity with his cameras so took plenty of footage and has now edited this together to make a brief video to show off what we did. This has been put together in order to  promote the course and show future students what the trip is likely to involve, but it should be of general interest to those who have not seen Dinosaur Provincial Park firsthand and what a better idea about hunting dinosaurs.

 

 

 

 

 

Yet more hadrosaur heads

The Musings seems to be have been on a bit of an unintentional roll for hadrosaur heads recently. There were some Lambeosaurus heads to go with Nipponosaurus but now here’s something of a flood. Steve Cohen, who kindly supplied a bunch of AMNH pterosaurs, has sent in this set of heads from the halls of the AMNH and it’s a nice example of the variety of crests and expansions seen in the group.

While some of these genera have made appearances on these pages before (like this Corythosaurus and while not shown here, don’t forget the amazing Tsintaosaurus) this is good chance to smush them all together and make them much easier to compare and contrast. A couple have also been flipped to put everything in left lateral view, though this means that the nicely labelled Saurolophus as the bottom is now covered in mirror writing.

Here then are (in order): Corythosaurus, Hypacrosaurus, Kritosaurus, Lambeosaurus, Prosaurolophus and finally Saurolophus.

Hadrosaur crests

Here we have the tops of two hadrosaur skulls and thus the crested parts of them. Below is Corythosaurus though obviously rather more developed that the individual I showed yesterday. Above that is the famous Parasaurolophus with its long posteriorly directed tube-like crest. Hadrosaur crests have had all manner of function assigned to them (as, would you believe, we discuss in this paper) but there’s little to evidence to support most of the more extreme ideas (like it being a snorkel in Parasaurolophus despite, you know, not having any openings) and in the majority of cases they are best interpreted as being signalling structures.

Corythosaurus

Having covered a stray Lambeosaurus skull just before the end of last year, it’s time to catch back up with the last of the Carnegie images (and boy have I made these last!). And I do have some more ornithopods to go, or more specifically, hadrosaurs. First off is this rather nice Corythosaurus that’s mounted in a quadrupedal stance. While I’ve not seen that many hadrosaur mounts most have been as bipeds, and those that are down on all fours usually have the head right up, so this is different if nothing else. Nice too to see the ossified tendons being prominent too. Tomorrow, more head crests.

Multiple Maiasaura

What is the proper common plural of ‘Maiasaura‘ anyway? Maiasauras, Maiasaurases, Maiasaurs? Anyway, doesn’t really matter, here are some of them, once more delving into my collection from the recent exhibition in Tokyo. Above is a partial skeleton augmented by casts, and below a number of sculpted babies in a nest.

A super Saurolophus

This specimen may not be immediately familiar, but those who know my work well will certainly know the humerus. This is the specimen that was chomped on and led to my paper on tyrannosaur scavenging. As noted there, one major aspect of the paper was that the rest of the material was in otherwise excellent condition, implying that that the carcass was unavailable for consumption – this was scavenging of a dead animal and not simply late-stage carcass consumption.

So here is the rest of that specimen (well most of it) and as you can see it’s both a large individual and in wonderful condition. The bone surfaces are superb, the vast majority of it is preserved, and there are even small elements like gastralia and some skin in there too (and some 62 consecutive caudals!). The size meant that I took a number of photos for this post simply because to try and fit it all in otherwise (as with the top image) leads to all manner of parallax and that hardly serves the best well.

Hadrosaur hands

Many moons ago I wrote a short post on the pedal unguals of hadrosaurs and in it I mentioned jsut how similar they are to those of the hand. To prove that point, here is a hadrosaurs hand that can be contrasted the the foot from the link above. It’s worth remembering that for a long time the ornithopods (that is hadrosaurs and igunaodontians) were considered proper bipeds and not the facultative bipeds we think of them now.

Obviously it’s not like people *didn’t* think about this when they came up with the hypothesis, but one does have to wonder a bit quite what they did think these hands were good for if they weren’t walking on them, especially when they are so obviously similar to the feet which were being walked on. Swimming doesn’t really fit or the toes would be longer and more widely spaced out, and I’m not aware of any other hypotheses that were floating around. Even so, it’s remarkable how some things cling on in the collective conciousness and I still come across the idea that hadrosaurs were semi-aquatic though I think this bit the dust in the 60s if not before.