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 ...

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, and all examined your turkeyosauruses.  I have only one question about your eating of the turkeys.  Did your teeth bite through the tough outer layer on the leg bones?  Can you see your teeth marks on the turkey bones?  I suspect you didn't because your teeth aren't sharp enough.  The only way we have of knowing which kinds of dinosaurs that dinosaurs like T.rex ate is by finding T.rex bite marks on the bones of other dinosaurs.  We know that T.rex ate Triceratops, and T.rex ate Anatosaurus (“Edmontosaurus”), and we know that T.rex even at ...

Skeleton of T.rex

Thanksgiving is the very best time to remember that birds are dinosaurs.  That turkey you are eating was a living dinosaur.  I suggest that you keep all those bones after dinner, so that you will have the skeleton of a little dinosaur (only do this with a parent’s permission—an adult can help you boil them clean).  Then compare the turkey skeleton with the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus or a Velociraptor. 

Skeleton of Velociraptor

Examine things like the proportions of each leg bone.  The lengt ...

In the Early Cretaceous section of our new Dinosaurs under the Big Sky exhibit is a display that shows two Deinonychus climbing up the neck of a sauropod.  This scene is very controversial as it suggests that raptor-like dinosaurs including Velociraptor used their hand claws to climb their prey.  The so-called slashing claw might also have been used to dig into the prey animal's body as the raptor climbed up to feed on the live animal.  I think all the small predatory dinosaurs like Deinonychus, Velociraptor, Troodon and others attacked in groups and climbed their prey to begin feeding.

The reason for thinking that these dinosaurs could scale their prey has to do with the shape ...

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 ...