Basilemys: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

This is a picture of a tortoise that was found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument a few years ago and is now on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah.  You can see the similarities to our friend Basilemys, with the jumble of bones under the shell.

 

 

 

Here are a few of the elements in the Museum’s tortoise (click on the photo to enlarge it so you can see the outline colors clearly):

• What remains of the shell is outlined in blue.  Not having the entire shell actually gives the opportunity to see what was found inside this famous specimen.

• The bone outlined in red is the pelvis.

• Outlined in green is a limb bone.

• The shape outlined in purple is a vertebra.

• The items outlined in yellow are actually fossilized eggs, which makes this tortoise pretty amazing because it’s only the second one ever to be discovered with eggs inside of it.

Also on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah is a section of shell from a basilemys like ours.  This specimen is just the plastron (bottom shell) but is one of the more complete specimens for this type of tortoise thus far.  When our current basilemys is done, it will be even more complete than this one.  It, too, will be sent to the Natural History Museum for study and eventual (we hope) display.

We will have at least a few more installments to share with you before that happens, though. Stay with us for the rest of the journey and, unless a Museum staff person is following this blog, you’ll know before the Museum does what their new arrival will look like at the end of the road .

New dino: Monument’s “monstrous murderer”

A hearty welcome to the new GSENM tyrannosaur that scientists from Carthage College and Brigham Young University named last week!

The Monument (the Kaiparowits Plateau to be specific) has yielded yet another new dinosaur – this one a meat-eater related to the notorious Tyrannosaurus rex. The new name: Teratophoneus curriei. In rough English: “Currie’s monstrous murderer.”

Welcome, murderer! (Photo courtesy of Gaston Design.)

Besides the cool name, what else stands out about this monster? It turns out that the new dinosaur could be a missing link in the evolution of the tyrannosaur family, reports the Smithsonian blog:

Found in the 75-million-year-old rock of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Teratophoneus is known from a partial skull and additional elements from the rest of the skeleton. Its head was short—a departure from the typically long-snouted profiles of other tyrannosaurs—and it was a close relative of the northern forms Daspletosaurus and (pan American forms of) Tyrannosaurus. Based on its anatomy and its geographic place, Teratophoneus appears to be part of a unique radiation of southern tyrannosaurs.

Paleontologists have seen this pattern before. Just last year scientists described two new horned dinosaurs from the same place—Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops—which indicated that dinosaurs in the American Southwest evolved differently from their cousins to the north. There must have been some sort of barrier that kept dinosaur populations separate and caused the northern and southern groups to evolve in distinct ways. The peculiar anatomy of Teratophoneus adds further support to this idea.

The Smithsonian points out that while “monstrous murderer” is a heck of a scary name, the actual animal was no T. rex. Teratophoneus weighed in at just one-tenth the mass of the terrifying, seven-ton Tyrannosaurus.

At any rate, the new name is a much better fit than the one I’d been using for the Monument’s skull cast of the critter. (You might recall seeing the cast at Dr. Kirk Johnson’s fossil talk in Kanab last month.)

Dr. Kirk Johnson, chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, getting primeval with Teratophoneus (left) and Diabloceratops (right). (Photo by Beth Kampschror.)

For lack of a better name, or any name at all, I referred to this skull cast — which is a cast of a juvenile — as “Junior.” Hardly a fierce or scary name.

But “monstrous murderer,” well, that’s more like it.

–Beth Kampschror, Communications Coordinator

Escalante Dino Day

Editor’s note: Nearly 90 elementary school students descended on the Escalante Interagency Visitor Center to learn about dinosaurs on Friday. Partners helped coordinate the field trip, while Monument staff and volunteers ran the stations. Visitor Center manager Jeanie Linn offers her thoughts here:

The entire Escalante Elementary School — 87 students plus teachers and assistants — arrived at the Escalante Interagency Visitor Center on Friday for a program on dinosaurs.

Paleontologist Alan Titus presented a talk on dinosaurs that have been discovered on the Monument and answered numerous questions from the 1^st to 6^th graders. Interpretive Specialist Mary Dewitz gave an interpretive program on the traveling ceratops exhibit, and two Monument volunteers gave a demonstration on how scientists unearth and clean up dinosaur bones. GSEP Education Coordinator Wade Parsons had the event well organized and it went smoothly with the sound of happy kids filling the Visitor Center for three hours.

The kids were extremely well behaved and they asked many great questions. My favorite was “How long does a dinosaur live?” The answer is that it took approximately 20 years for them to reach full size and then they lived for approximately 40-45 years after that!

Later that day when I went to the grocery store, I had several teachers approach me and tell me that the students had a wonderful time and that they just couldn’t quit talking about dinosaurs! Since then we have had a number of the kids bring their families to the Visitor Center to see the traveling exhibits that will be here until the end of February. So the Dino Day Event lives on.

– Jeanie Linn, Escalante Visitor Center Manager

Are you interested in doing this type of interpretive and educational work with students at the visitor center in Kanab? Partners is organizing a pool of volunteers to help out with student field trips this spring. If you’d like to participate, please call Education Coordinator Wade Parsons at 435.644.4354.

Fossil talk packed the house!

Thanks to everyone who turned out for Kirk Johnson’s talk!

Some 150 people showed up to hear about Kaiparowits fossil plants, a Wyoming cave that contains the remains of 40,000 ancient animals, and Kirk’s talent for spotting dinosaur tracks from the car at 65 miles per hour.

Also attending were Diabloceratops eatoni and a juvenile Tyrannosaur — two of the skull casts that make up part of the Partners/BLM traveling exhibits.

If you missed the talk, you can read our article about it here.

And stay tuned for our upcoming multi-media piece about Kirk’s research on the Monument. Kirk and MIT geologist Sam Bowring spent Wednesday sampling a bunch of ancient volcanic ash beds near Big Water.

The two scientists are whittling down the margin of error in dating this ash. The slideshow will have all the details, so please keep an eye out for that as we head through January.

– Beth Kampschror, Communications Coordinator