Royal Tyrrell Museum Update: May/Early June, 1997.

[Darren Tanke <dtanke@dns.magtech.ab.ca>]

 Delayed update from your frenetically busy correspondant, but here goes:

 1. LOST AND FOUND EXHIBIT. This "Lost World" exhibit was built during the
winter/spring and set up late May. Not sure how long it will run, but I've
been told well into next year at a minimum. Helped build a SAURORNITHOLESTES
skeleton for this in just 11 days.

 2. NEW DINOSAUR MOVIE. No, not another Jurassic Park, but something to do
with that very near-sighted cartoon character of long ago "Mr. Magoo".
Filmed in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Leslie Neilsen (of the "Naked Gun" movie
series) plays Mr. Magoo. Tyrrell provided many of the sets. These were
plastic. Can you imagine a real Mr. Magoo in a museum of real fossil
dinosaur mounts?! I'd have gauranteed job security. I don't know when this
movie is to be released.

 3. NEW DINOSAUR FIND. Just found out yesterday that a possible TROODON
skeleton has been found in the Drumheller Valley. Phil Currie has seen it.
There is a dentary with some teeth and a maxilla nearby. Nothing else is
showing, so hopefully all the rest of the skeleton is there. This will be
excavated this summer. Keep posted.

 4. DINOSAUR PROVINCIAL PARK (DPP). Little to report at this time. I arrived
there on June 2nd. We are continuing with the multigeneric bonebed (Bonebed
47) and are finding little more lots of waterworn bone fragments and small
teeth, as per last year. I was able to get 2 perfect hadrosaur cervical
vertebrae however. There is only a couple square metres of the lower bone
layer to finish. Once that's done we'll open up Bonebed 41a, another
CENTROSAURUS bonebed.  Bonebed 138, yet another CENTROSAURUS bonebed in
Dinosaur Park, and opened last year will be excavated and closed at the end
of this summer. It is in older sediments than the majority of the Park and
we hope a new species is represented there. More adult frill material is
needed for confirmation. Some overburden removal work was done on last years
GORGOSAURUS quarry. Hopefully this quarry will be finished this summer when
Phil Currie is there July and August. I continue to find good evidence for
baby hadrosaurs in the Park. University of Pennsylvania student Allison
Tumarkin and Josh Smith are in DPP now. Josh is doing a side project on
ceratopsian bone histology.

 You may remember my querie last summer for details on Plate 74 in Colberts
1968 book "Men and Dinosaurs". With additional photos I can now tell you the
specimen being hoisted in that picture is the DASPLETOSARUS now mounted at
the Chicago Field Museum. From our library, I made photocopies of some other
old AMNH quarry photographs. I have been able to match up another one. For
those of you familiar with C.M. Sternbergs dinosaur quarry map "Steveville"
GSC 969A, some of the Barnum Brown quarries are unidentified. I can provide
a minor update here. For the quarry marked in red as "75", change "?, BB" to
"hadrosaur, BB". I found some old wire and nails, a plank of wood, a broken
glass jar (40 pieces, many fit together but still not all there), and some
early June, 19?? newspaper fragments. From the latter I can get some
historical details which should allow me to figure out the year of the
newspaper and thus the quarry. Then, using Brown's field notes, I should, by
process of elimination be able to figure out what actually came out of
there. I have my suspicions, but need confirmation. Quarry 75 was one site
we had been looking for for many years. Turns out it was never staked (A
pipe set in concrete with data-bearing brass/bronze plate afixed atop) and
is just a stones toss off the well travelled bus tour road! I am keen to
relocate the area shown in Plate 65 of Colberts book too. I have the extreme
background lined up. Unfortunately if I use that area as a pivot and I a
pendulum, that background feature is visible over a very wide arch.
Frustrating!    
  
 5. DRUMHELLER. A full plate of quarrying activities. #3 has already been
noted. In addition, a EUOPLOCEPHALUS skeleton and a tyrannosaur skeleton
need to be collected. Clive Coy will be heading up all or most of these digs.

 6. CLIVE COY. For those of you have not already heard, Clive Coy will be
leaving us in September and taking the head technician job at a new
paleontological museum being developed and built in Okiyama, Japan. This
also includes 3 expeditions to the Gobi Desert- a place Clive has been long
fascinated in. We were to both go there on Ex Terra digs in 1989, but the
Tianneman Square massacre ruined that.

 7. PALEOPATHOLOGY PAPER. Phil Currie and I have about finished a paper for
the Theropod Paleobiology Volume to be published by GAIA out of Portugal
next year. The papers working title is: Tanke, D.H. and Currie, P.J.
"Head-Biting in Theropods: Paleopathological Evidence". 2 other theropod
papers for the GAIA volume are also being written up and finalized by
Tyrrell staff. The upcoming GAIA volume should be a real important tome.

 8. GOUT ARTICLE. I am amazed at the media response to our "gout in
tyrannosaurs" paper recently published in Nature (Vol. 387:357). I thank
those who have sent newspaper clippings and popular science magazine
articles. For the nearly finished "Dinosaur Paleopathology and Related
Topics" bibliography, I could use a few more citations. I'm told it also
appeared in Newsweek, can anybody provide a full citation (author, volume
number, page number)? Any other tyrannosaur gout popular literature
citations are welcomed. Please email or mail me originals/photocopies with
full citation.

 9. UTAH TRIP. On Sept. 1st I fly down to meet Brooks Britt to work on his
Early Cretaceous multi-generic dinosaur bonebed. I'm there for a month or so.

 10. SVP, CHICAGO. People ask, will you be there?!?! The answer is YES! Once
finished helping Brooks Britt, we fly to Chicago.

 11. EASTON, PENNSYLVANIA TRIP. Sat in on Allison Tumarkin's undergraduate
thesis defense mid-May. She did an excellent and confident presentation on
paleontological and geological aspects of our Bonebed 47 dig in Dinosaur
Park. Peter Dodson and Josh Smith were there and Peter brought up the frill
of the controversial ceratopsian AVACERATOPS. A most interesting specimen,
but I can't go into details here save to say, despite it being a juvenile
specimen, I am now open to the possibility it truly is a valid genus [there
I said it, now all my ceratopsian collegues and friends who know I've been
slagging AVACERATOPS for years will jump on me. O.K. TOUGH GUYS COME AND GET
ME!! :) ]. Allison will be in a Masters/Ph. D program with Peter Dodson.
I'll provide details of her thesis project once that has been ironed out.

 12. PASQUIORNIS tankei. I was elated to see a Late Cretaceous bird named
after me by collegue Tim Tokaryk and others in the latest Journal of
Vertebrate Paleontology. It is my hope that some of you will have something
named after you someday. It is a real special feeling, very hard to describe. 

 13. HILDA, ALBERTA EXPEDITION. This will occur later this summer and I will
report accordingly then.

 That's it. Please send some warm weather here. It has been windy, overcast,
chilly and showery/severe thunderstorms for most of June.

 As I'm now in the field, I will send field updates to this list every 12-14
days.

 Best,

 Darren Tanke

 

 
Darren Tanke
Technician I, Dinosaur Research Program
Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, Box 7500
Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. T0J 0Y0
             and
Senior Editor on the:
Annotated Bibliography of Paleopathology, Dento-Osteopathy and Related Topics
11,364 citations as of March 7, 1997.
Visit our bibliography homepage at: http://dns.magtech.ab.ca/dtanke
Can you help with this ongoing project? Email me at: dtanke@dns.magtech.ab.ca