Painting by Doug Henderson

I've been traveling a lot lately, and am posting this blog from New York City where I'm working with a couple of my co-authors on two new books—one about dinosaurs and one about learning differences.  But as I was sitting here looking out at all the big buildings, it got me to thinking about how large dinosaur herds or other social gatherings might have been.  Many years ago we discovered a huge bone bed of Maiasaura that suggested that more than 10,000 Maiasaura died in a catastrophic event such as a hurricane or volcanic eruption—but just how big might these groups have been?  If 10,000 died that most likely means that there were many more that lived, so the original herd probably exceeded at least 20,000.  Modern wildebeest herds consist of more t ...

This past week most of my graduate students, some staff members and I attended the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting in Austin, Texas.  I gave a lecture showing that the dinosaurs Dracorex, Stigymoloch and Pachycephalosaurus are all the same species, but at different growth stages.  This research was done by Mark Goodwin of Berkeley, California and Holly Woodward and I from here at MOR.  In the presentation I showed that Dracorex and Stigymoloch have bone tissues that are only known from juveniles.  Some people disagreed with our findings, but didn't have any evidence to disprove the hypothesis.

This is the correct way to do science--make a hypothesis backed up by evidence ...

This past week I had the honor of meeting a young dinosaur paleontologist in Katowice, Poland.  HIs name is Kuba, and he and I met and talked about dinosaurs for about an hour.  His questions were as good as those of many graduate students, and so I invited him to be one of the graduate students.  Kuba's favorite dinosaur is T.rex, although after I gave him some bones of Psittacosaurus, he decided that little dinosaurs were just as interesting as the big ones.  Kuba was also very interested in talking about our museum here in Montana because he thought there should be a dinosaur museum in southern Poland.  I told Kuba that I would help him and others to create such a museum.  A number of newspapers agreed they would help as well.

Kub ...

Image by Meridith Wolfe

This past week saw the publication of a paper about our new dinosaur named Cerasinops hodgkissi. Cerasinops means "Red Face," hodgkissi is to honor Wilson Hodgkiss of Choteau, Montana, for allowing us to collect this dinosaur from his land, for the Museum of the Rockies. The dinosaur was named and described by our former Post-Doctoral Fellow, Brenda Chinnery, and I.  This is a dinosaur skeleton that I found in 1984, and had in our collections all these years as we waited for someone to come along who knew about protoceratopsian dinosaurs. Brenda was this person.  Cerasinops is a very important new dinosaur as it has characteristics that show a close relation ...

We have completed another year in the Gobi Desert, and this season we collected more than 80 skeletons of Psittacosaurus bringing our collection up to nearly 200 specimens.  One hundred and seventy seven will be used for a special study to be conducted by our new Mongolian doctoral student Badmaa Zorgit.  Besides the many Psittacosaurus skeletons we also found portions of other dinosaurs including a large meat-eater, and a possible Stegosaurus-like dinosaur.
 
This years Mongolia crew included doctoral students John Scannella, Denver Fowler, and Badmaa Zorgit, our new post-doc for 2008, Bolor Minjin, our new Master's student Bassanjav, Nels Peterson, and myself.  We also had a crew of 4 other Mongolians.

Sometimes its good for a scientist to just sit around and think.  In my preparation for going to Mongolia, I've been thinking alot about Psittacosaurus and why we find so many of them in areas we call "psittco-cities."  So far we have over 100 skeletons from an area less than one square mile in size.  Finding a lot of psittacosaurs is important for the kind of studies we're trying to make, like determining species variation, but it is curious that there are so many skeletons in such a relatively small space, and that few of them are babies, or large adults.  The fact that there are few babies suggests that it's probably not where they raised their young--so what could it be?  It's a very curious puzzle, and this season we will try to find a solution.  We wi ...

Although we officailly ended our Montana field season on the 10th of August, we realized that there was still an important specimen of Triceratops that needed to be collected before winter.  Grad students John Scannella, Denver Fowler, Brian Basiak, Liz Freedman, and I drove out to Hell Creek to excavate what we thought was a partial skull of a subadult Triceratops.  It turned out to be both a skull and front leg.

While John, Denver, and Brian finished that excavation, Liz and I drove to Havre where we met Field Crew Chief Bob Harmon, and we three took a day to search the Judith River Formatio ...

Now that all our Montana crews are out of the field, several of us are preparing for our last expedition of the year to Mongolia to continue collecting specimens of Psittacosaurus.  So far we have more than 100 skeletons that will be used to study species variation, and population histology.  We are working with Bolor Minjin and her father Minjin Chulaan out of the Science and Technology University of Mongolia.  You can check out what we've been up to by reading the cover story in the latest issue of Discover Magazine (September 2007 issue).  The photo shows one of our psittacosaur excavations from last year.  The pole holds a camera for taking time-lapse photography.

This is our last week in the field, as our students have to get back to school, and so we are spending the week getting all our field jackets carried out of sites, packed onto trailers, and sent back to Bozeman. We have made an incredible collection of Triceratops, adults and juveniles, and found many other kinds of dinosaurs as well.  Our final explorations will be by boat this Friday as we collect hadrosaur nest remains along the Milk River.  Then we will do our final task of creating a 3-D topographic image of the Egg Mountain area near Choteau.      

On the morning of Wednesday, August 1st, the Museum of the Rockies was able to successfully broadcast live video from the Snap Creek dig site to both the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana and to a live audience of around 80 people at the Natural History Museum in London (image shows crowd in London)! The event was also webcast live on the London museum's website. During the broadcast Dr. Horner conversed with British paleontologist Angela Milner about Triceratops and T.rex research being done at MOR. Audience members were even able to ask questions for Jack to answer on the spot. Look for more events like this in the future.