A new button has appeared on the MOR Paleo website! Check out an original MOR video created during the summer of 2008 field season. Dinosaur Diaries, which can be found on the lifeonterra.com website. lifeonterra.com is the website for TERRA: The Nature of Our World--a site that showcases the work of students in the Science and Natural History Filmmaking MFA program at Montana State University. TERRA also provides free downloads of their podcasts through iTunes (http://www.apple.com/search/ipoditunes/?q=TERRA, click on "podcasts"). This

This just in from Research Associate and Histology Technician, Ellen-Therese Lamm:

The Gabriel Lab for Cellular and Molecular Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies (aka ‘the SEM room’), which houses the lab's Scanning Electron Microscope, is now equipped with something we’ve all been waiting for….a Motorized Microscope Stage. This means that paleontologists at MOR will now be able to control the microscope stage with a joystick - moving their thin-section specimens (thin slices of dinosaur bone) up and down, left and right, and back and forth.  They will be able to capture digital images as they scan and then stitch these images together. This will provide a much more complete image of large b ...

Field jackets in the lab--each contains fossils, dirt and rock.

Hello everyone—Molly Ward, Paleontology Educator here again. The 2008 summer field season is coming to a close. Students and volunteers are returning to the museum in dusty trucks full of fossil jackets. Most of the fossils that were excavated since May were covered with a protective plaster jacket and stored at the field site. Now, truckloads of those lumpy white jackets are appearing in the lab, and paleo hallways at the museum.

Some of the jackets are already being opened and preparators in our labs are starting to prepare (clean) the matrix (extra dirt and rock) off the fossils using tools like dental picks. Each jacket is ...

Crew members get ready to finish a plaster jacket around a fossil at a 2008 dig site.

This is MOR Paleontology Educator Molly Ward guest-blogging on Jack Horner's Bone Blog. Jack and his crews (around 80 people at any given time) are currently scattered around the state of Montana at at least five different dig sites. The digs are located in areas where rocks from the Creteaceous period (rocks that are the right age to contain dinosaur fossils) are exposed at the surface of the Earth, and dinosaur fossils have been found weathering out of the rock.

I was lucky enough to visit two of these dig sites this summer. I can tell you that dig crews spend long hot days getting very dirty! They camp in tents and trailers in the dry Montana badlands and have to watch out for snakes. The dirt a ...

A guest blog entry by Bolortsetseg Minjin, postdoctoral researcher from Mongolia currently working at the Museum of the Rockies:


Bolor (pronounced Boldra) with Jack Horner at a Mongolian dig site.

I am a paleontologist at the museum doing research with Dr. Jack Horner. We are working on the paleobiology of the dinosaur Psittacosaurus, and I am working specifically on how the skull of this dinosaur changes as the animal matures. Psittacosaurus is a sheep-sized dinosaur that is a primitive member of the ceratopsian dinosaur group, which includes the horned dinosaurs like Triceratops.

I just got back from a trip to Mongolia, and I borrowed and brought back some bones of Psittacosaurus ...

Although collecting dinosaur DNA from insects fossilized in amber has not yet resulted in a real Jurassic Park, scientists are still thinking about whether it might ever be possible to produce a living dinosaur. In fact, most of us see living dinosaurs everyday—birds—the descendents of dinosaurs. In the new Discovery Channel special Dinosaurs: Return to Life? I suggest that scientists may someday be able to “retro-engineer” dinosaurian characteristics such as teeth, scaly skin and long tails in modern birds. In fact, research is already underway by other paleontologists working on gene modification in chicken embryos. They have successfully produced embryos with longer tails and the beginnings of teeth. As this kind of research continues, I predict that within the next 50 years or less we will be able to flip genetic switches and produce living birds with dinosaurian traits.

Science is making it possible that we could retro-engineer a dinosa ...

This past week we hosted paleontologist Thomas Carr from Carthage College in Wisconsin.  Thomas studies Tyrannosaurus rex. Because we have one of the best T.rex collections in the world, T.rex specialists often visit the Museum of the Rockies.  Thomas was here for several projects he is working on and also to visit with me concerning a project to determine if Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus rex could possibly be the same animal but represent different growth stages.  The biggest difference between these two tyrannosaurs besides size is that T.rex has 12 to 13 teeth in each of its lower jaws, whereas smaller Nanotyrannus has 17 in each jaw.  No other dinosaurs are known to l ...

This week I begin teaching two classes. One is called Origins and is taught by 3 Montana State professors.  Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist starts the class with the origin of the universe, string theory, and so on. Then, after spring break, I will lead the second part on the origin of life, and evolution.  Mike Miles, a theologian, will come in during the discussions of science with philosophical and religious perspectives.  This class is very popular, but is offered to only 15 to 17 of the top students at MSU.  The second class I'm teaching is called Comparative Osteology, and it is for graduate students in paleontology and biology.  This is an important class for paleontologists because it’s where we learn all about bone biology.  Over the course of the semester I will share (on the blog) summaries of each week’s Comparative Osteology classes, and probably pass along some tid-bits concerning the Origins class.

New Years is a funny time for a paleontologist since we generally think in terms of millions of years.  What's another year, other than a time to be thinking about what we collected last summer, or what we might find next summer?  This year (2007 for the next 10 hours) was my 25th year at the Museum of the Rockies, and it is kind of fun to think back on all the specimens that my field crews have collected over two and a half decades.  We have more than a dozen T.rex skeletons, two dozen Triceratops, and nearly fifty skeletons of dinosaurs like Maiasaura, Hypacrosaurus and Einiosaurus.  We have the world’s only Triceratops growth series, the best known specimens of T ...

Plant-eating dinosaur tooth

Continuing the discussion on teeth, one of the things I find interesting is that dinosaur teeth are very simple, unlike mammal teeth that are very complex.  I think most paleontologists would agree that the reason for this is that mammals generally only replace their teeth once during their lives whereas dinosaurs and other reptiles replace their teeth throughout their lives.  T.rex apparently replaced each of its teeth every year or so.  For this reason dinosaur teeth didn't have to be completely covered with enamel or have complex shapes.  They could be rather simple because they would be replaced before they were completely worn out.  So, almost all meat-eater teeth are identical to one another except for ha ...