Bone Blog

Lights, Camera, Action!

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:09:00 GMT

The Museum of the Rockies paleontology department presents...videos! Paleontology Educator Molly Ward has recently created a YouTube channel showcasing over 15 short educational videos about our dinosaur digs, paleo lab, museum collections and how we know what we know about dinosaurs!

You can access the channel at www.youtube.com/user/paleoed. The videos will also shortly be accessible on the MOR website as well.

New videos are being uploaded all the time, so tell your friends, educators, and all the dinosaur fanatics that you know to check it out!

Dinosaur Diaries: Watch a flim about MOR Dino Digs

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:27:00 GMT

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 Dinosaur Diaries film is actually a compilation of three of the eleven short films produced by videographer John Little (a graduate of the MSU Natural History and Science Filmmaking program) and his student assistants, Nicole Podgorski and Mike Nyman this past summer. Soon, these videos and others will be available for viewing here on our website and in the Mesozoic Media Center at the Museum of the Rockies. Also, the Dinosaur Diaries series on TERRA will continue as new films are produced. Stay tuned!

Stitch in Time Saves Graduate Student's Prime

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:48:00 GMT

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 bone specimen microstructure.

Jan Strelow of Meridian Instrument Co. arrived Thursday August 7th and adapted our Nikon Optiphot2 POL scope with a PRIOR automated stage - the OptiScan II. Later in the day, Scott Henderson and Dan Fong of Nikon arrived to set up the computer with X, Y and Z plane drivers for the stage. The operation is run through our NIS-Elements Image Analysis (IA) software. Dan will be returning in 1 month to complete the set-up, and offer training for MOR employees and students on both the stage and IA software.

Fossils arriving at MOR

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:01:00 GMT

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 a bit like a present—although they are labeled with information about the site and what the field crew thought they had found, the preparators are never quite sure surprise awaits them still buried in the dirt and rock.

Update-Summer 2008 Field Season

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:13:00 GMT

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 and lack of sleep is worth it though, when you discover a dinosaur bone!

Paleontology in Mongolia

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:43:00 GMT

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 with me to study here at the Museum of the Rockies. I just started my postdoctoral research in Bozeman this year. So far I have really enjoyed living here. Bozeman is similar to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the city where I was born and grew up. Both places have blue skies and are surrounded by mountains.

Just last year I established a research institution for paleontology in Mongolia, called the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs, with the support of Dr. Jack Horner. This institution has both research and educational objectives. Molly Ward, who is the Paleontology Educator here at the museum, is helping me to develop paleontology and geology educational programs for K-12 students and for the public in Mongolia. Currently, Mongolia does not have educational resources about paleontology. The Museum of the Rockies has given tremendous support to our new institution to help Mongolian paleontology and education.

Dinosaurs: Return to Life?

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:30:00 GMT

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 dinosaur from a bird, but should we? Experimenting with genetic engineering can be controversial, but experiments such as those discussed above can drastically advance our understanding of the process and mechanisms of evolution and relationships between birds and dinosaurs.

X-rays of Tyrannosaur Jaws

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 01:13:00 GMT

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 lose teeth during growth, so if these two species were to be discovered to represent a single species it would show that T.rex did something no other dinosaur is known to have done. To try to figure this out we took several tyrannosaur jaws to the Bozeman hospital and had them X-rayed so that we could study the inside of the jaws to see how the teeth grow. One of these days we will let you know what we have discovered.

Photo of Bozeman hospital workers x-raying tyrannosaur jaws from Ellen Therese-Lamm

Back to class...

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:15:00 GMT

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.

A New Year for Paleontology

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 23:45:00 GMT

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 Tenontosaurus, Einiosaurus, Achelosaurus, Thescelosaurus, Orodromeus, Hypacrosaurus stebingeri, and Troodon. MOR also has the only dinosaur egg clutches known from the United States. I think it’s pretty cool that 25 years ago a person would have to go to New York City to see fossils from most of the dinosaur species found here in Montana. Now we have them on display right here at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. In 2008 we'll go out and find some more--we'll probably ship some of them off to the Smithsonian so they too can have some Montana dinosaurs for people to see.

Above image: Egg clutches on display in the Hallway or Growth and Behavior at MOR.