31.12.08

a complex story (origins part 2)

(Production Note: Much of the content of this post is fictional, and not actually research Darren Tanke is engaging in. Please take this made up stuff in the spirit it is meant (and not harass or blame Mr. Tanke over OUR artistic license). We will be covering Darren's real research (which the fiction in this post is an exaggeration of) very shortly in the continuation of this storyline. Prehistoric Insanity)

with no obvious point behind the present that has returned me home, i've decided to create a purpose for the trip.

while i currently have access to one of the world's greatest palaeontologic institutions, i'm going to find out everything i can about how my egg was found and hatched.

now, there's a lot of details one can look into about any specific fossil...

  • where was it found?

  • who found it?

  • how did they find it?

  • how long until it was dug up?

  • who was on the field team that did the digging?

  • how long did the dig take?

  • how long till the fossil was prepared (that's a fancy word for cleaned off)?

  • who did the preparing?

  • who studied the fossil?
etc.

and this is only when you don't have a personal stake or connection to the fossil... which in this case i think i would have!

if there was one man at the museum who could help me with these questions, it was technician extraordinaire darren tanke. who thought i was just popping by his nook in the preparation lab to say hi... boy was he in for a surprise. i had like a million questions for him!

after the necessary catch up (like everyone darren was very interested to hear about my new zealand adventures... in particular my encounters with professor paradigm for some reason) i tried to present my current quest in a rational manner... which sadly with my brain capacity, and how excited i was to maybe get some answers wasn't so rational, but darren being the really clever guy he is figured out what i wanted to ask him.

now for those of you who haven't heard of darren tanke, well how to put it? as far as dinosaurs and palaeontology are concerned he is kinda a big deal!

darren started working at the tyrrell musuem a couple years before there technical WAS a museum (the alberta government had decided it was starting it up, but assembled the staff before the building was completed), and is now the longest serving staff member at the museum!

though he technically isn't a true palaeontologist (in that he never got a PHD) i think saying this, even though it is a fact, is kinda insulting. darren publishes more papers and articles a year than 2 or 3 of your average palaeontologists combined! he is an expert on ceratopsians, dinosaur pathology (that's fancy wording for dino injuries and illness), and the history of alberta's palaeontology. on top of that he is among the best of the best when it comes to digging up and/or preparing fossils.
_
it was darren's expertise in the history of alberta's fossil hunting in particular that i thought would help me the most at moment though. darren has made it his mission to try and track down every scientific dig site located in alberta. it helps that he has been on like half of them (well not really, but a lot). however making the job harder for him is that most of the early fossil hunters in the province didn't really record where they dug beyond vague references of general regions.
_
to solve this darren has become a quarry hunter. using clues such as pictures taken of these old digs, garbage left behind, and their old camp sites darren has been tracking down 5-10 of these old dig sites a year. along the way he has become an expert on not only who was working in alberta, but what has been dug up as well!
_
before talking to darren and having him fill in many of the gaps in the story, here is what i knew about my own discovery...

back sometime in the 1946 my mother (pictured here) was found by someone near the town of huxley alberta (about an hour north of drumheller). however due to the extreme nature of the site mommy was found at, they couldn't excavate (that's fancy wording for dug up) her at the time. so she was just left there. it wasn't till the early 80's when the tyrrell museum started active field expeditions that she was finally dug up. a team under the legendary phil currie (including darren!) finally rescued her from millions of years burial...
_
however this is only part of the story. afterall i'm not my mom. she was cleaned off and put up in the museum a good decade before i too was unearthed...
_
i know that my legal guardian craig discovered me by going back to my mom's site, and found my egg just below where she'd been taken out. the thing is though, that's about all i know...
_
i have reason to believe it is a way more interesting story though. my main clue is this old photo. it is labelled as being taken the day before i was found. you'll note not only is craig in the photo, but also my JERK! of a cousin, larry... what larry is doing there i have no clue...
_
this was the key part of the story i was very keen to learn. which i was hoping darren could help me with.
_
"the huxley site," darren seemed off put when i asked him. not by me mind you, rather the site i asked for. "it's just been a while since i actively looked into that one. it's not your normal site that one... just let me get my files on it."
_
darren went to work on his puter, and next thing you know i had all sorts of other facts to flesh out the story of my discovery.
_
to start off with in the museum's records, me and my mom are not known by our names. rather we have special collection numbers assigned to us. these as so that the museum can keep track of us in their huge collections, and scientists can refer to us specially and everyone will know what they mean (though why our names don't work for this purpose i'm not sure??).
_
my mom is TMP 81. 12. 1. which doesn't make a lot of sense if you don't know the tyrrell's numbering system. all museums have different cataloguing systems, but they usually involve numbers.
_
in the tyrrell's case these numbers mean something. TMP stands for tyrrell museum of palaeontology (the museum hadn't gotten the royal retitle when they started their collections so hence the lack of an R on the front). the 81 means mom was dug up in 1981, and this way you know when anything at the museum was dug up immediately. the 12 indicates that huxley was the 12th location the museum dug at, as the museum gives their fossil sites numbers to help keep track of where fossils are found. finally the 1 means mom was the first fossil found at the site.
_
i already knew this, but for you on the innerweb my number is TMP-2003. 12. 7. see if you can figure out what that means?
_
the right answer is i was found in 2003, august. 16 to be precise (my hatching day!) though the number won't tell you that. i was found at the 12th quarry in alberta aka. huxley, and i was the 7th specimen extracted (i was egg 6 out of 10... so as mom was number one, the last of those eggs in the nest was TMP- 2003. 12. 11).
_
next i got all sorts of facts about how mom was dug up. she was fossilized in the layer just below the KT boundary itself!... meaning both of us were literally among the last of the tyrannosaurs ever!...
fun fact this spot in huxley is one of the ONLY sites in all of alberta where the KT boundary is exposed! so it was really lucky we were buried there and not somewhere else...
_
(Production Note: Photo from Royal Tyrrell Museum Finders: A Century of Fossil Hunting in Alberta)
_
in the present, she was exposed halfway up a sheer cliff, and was only noticed due to some broken off chunks that had tumbled to the bottom through erosion. the height and steepness of this cliff proved too much for the limited field crew of mom's discoverer charles mortram sternberg, and she had to be left where they found her.
fortunately she was encased in solid ironstone so erosion was considerable slowed down, meaning mom could be left for quite sometime without too much worry of lose or damage to her skeleton. sternberg recorded this find, and hoped someone would return when the resources and manpower were available.
_
sadly this didn't happen till nearly 45 years later, when in 1981 phil currie of the tyrrell noted the find in sternberg's notes and organized a sizeable dig team. it was an ordeal, as the crew had to dig from the top of the cliff down nearly 30 metres to her skeleton (all this cliff material being called over burden as it was over top of the fossil in question and naturally a burden to remove!).
_
with this rather deep quarry there was constant danger of the cliff collapsing on the dig team, and with the majority of her body safely removed dr. currie reluctantly had to leave mom's head in the side of the hill. his worries proved correct as a few years later the quarry did slump, and had anyone been digging there they'd have been buried along with my mom's head!
_
poor mom though. i don't know what i'd do without my head. fortunately they were able to lend her a cast skull of another t-rex from montana!
_
this ended the clear part of the story, and the transition into the weirder part was marked by darren drawing out an annoyed "right," i looked at him puzzled. he turned to me with a slightly serious face. "remember how i said there were some weird things about huxley? that's because they tie into the commission."
_
"the what?" i asked.
_
"the dominion's palaeontologic commission," darren stated. than he threw a glance to the door, as though to make sure no one was listening in. "the precursor to palaeo central."
_
"you know about palaeo central?!?" i almost yelled in excitement.
_
darren shushed me with his finger. "no i don't know about them," he stated in a rather formal manner. he once again looked to the door, than satisfied no one was listening whispered. "no one knows about them. they officially don't exist, but if you've been working in palaeontology as long as me their activities become pretty obvious."
_
man did i have a ton of questions for darren now, but he refused to answer any of them. "look traumador, i understand if you just learned about them you'll want to know all about the, but trust me you don't really. the more you know the more you could risk compromising them and their operations. the palaeo central initiative is the only sure line of defense fossils have at the moment."
_
despite this slightly downer of a warning, darren winked at me "at the same time you can start to figure out some things about them, the same way i did," darren offered, and reached into one of his filing cabinets.

"i can even give you these without arising too much suspicion," darren assured himself. "as these documents pertain to your discovery."
_
which brought us back on tangent with why i was here. only now it had a hint of super spy excitement. what did my discovery have to do with palaeo central?
_
well it turns out it wasn't a direct link, and didn't have to do with palaeo central of professor paradigm really at all.
rather these documents came from way back in the early days of alberta palaeontology. the 1910's to be exact.
_
that was the time of great fossil hunters seriously prospecting and collecting in the badlands of alberta for fossils (though not the first time, it was just the first big effort to do so). in an era known as the great canadian dinosaur rush. back than teams from new york and ottawa competed (in a friendly manner mind you) to find and collect dinosaurs from the red deer river valley. as the rush is a big topic, my next post will be on it so i can stay on subject here. so stay tuned.
_
that's the general story though. two crews working the badlands, and finding lots of canadian dinosaurs. or at least that's the general official story. my heart started to race as i read on in darren's papers to find out it wasn't the whole story...
_
in the documents a whole new chapter to this era of palaeo history was added. while the famous exploits of the two teams were going on in the public eye, on the fringe there was something more ominous going down. in 1912 the canadian geologic survey detected activities by a third player. an european aristocrat by the name of lord antonin annex.
_
darren was able to track down some letters from the survey to the british colonel office. the letters claimed this annex guy had his own agents working in alberta, who were digging up fossils and than smuggling them back to central europe to his private collect. the survey implored the british to assist them.
_
it was at this point the story ended. well at least in the papers in front of me... "hey what happened next?" i demanded of papers, not darren mind you. i was just annoyed as though i'd only gotten half a book, and it cut out at the best part.
_
darren grinned at me. "officially nothing," he typed something into the computer. "the british colonel office never replied, and these 'accusations' against annex were never proven."
_
"however try and look anything up from this period in the geologic survey's database and," darren explained as he hit a key. instead of access to the database, he got an access denied pop up requesting a user name and password. "kinda funny don't you think. what with this being a public database and all. i never would have found out a thing if i hadn't tracked down those hardcopies. "
_
"here is what happened next in 1912, as best i can put together," darren offered.
_
the colonial office did respond. though they were unable to take direct action against annex or his country due to the growing tensions that would explode into world war 1. however they were able to give the survey the resources it needed to deal with the situation internally. thus was born the dominion's (canada was called the dominion back than) palaeontologic commission.
_
"that sounds just like..." i started to say, meaning to say palaeo central.
_
darren cut me off agreeing with me. "yes, it does doesn't it."
_
darren flipped to what looked like some boring notes in a geologic survey manifest. they weren't boring at all on closer inspection though! they were chronological notes of the palaeontologic commission activities for the years 1912 through 1917...
_
"again, someone went to a lot of trouble to bury or cover up this organization," darren cautioned me. i could just picture professor paradigm with a big vault or something like one, stuffed full of books and paper. "i was just lucky enough to stumble across these summary notes taken by a secretary during a meeting somewhere. they weren't supposed to be taken. i suspect they were written as reminders for a bigger summary."
_
according to the notes, there'd been a secret battle going on in the back ground of the dinosaur rush. as the legitimate fossil hunters scoured the badlands, covertly so were people working for this lord annex. these "annex" agents got away with a lot in the first two years of the dinosaur rush...
_
lord annex had 14 skeletons dug up and smuggled to him (none of which have yet been accounted for). his agents sabotaged the legitimate crew's efforts, tried to play the them off each other, and even on occasion stole their fossils from under their own noses. that is till this palaeontologic commission began operations.
_
suddenly there was a counter-attack against annex's people in the badlands. there were a lot of exploits by the commission, but sadly these were only recorded in darren's book as one sentence summaries. many were very tantalizing, but of course lacking any details. after a couple of minutes the records for july 1914 caught my attention.
_
annex's men had been driven away from what would one day be dinosaur provincial park, and so they moved their operations up north. the society followed him, and this took them to around huxley!
_
"well done," darren smiled when i shoved the page with the reference in his face. "i wondered if you'd find that part."
_
darren handed me an official geologic field report with this photo attached. there was something about the picture that i found funny. i couldn't put my finger on it, but i'm sure i stared at it, as darren asked. "recognize it?"
_
"should i?" i answered with a question not looking up. the picture had me enthralled. i did feel as though it was familiar...

"you tell me," darren responded. "it is where you were born."

i looked up at darren and i'm sure my jaw dropped. that made no sense! how was it there was a photo of people working at my egg site almost a hundred years ago?!?

"remember how i told you a second ago charlie sternberg found this site in 1946. well i know as a matter of a fact that is almost the truth," darren clarified. "charlie did technically find it on his own, but he knew roughly where he should be looking... because of this." darren pointed to the report. "a field report written by member of the commission 32 years earlier."

"i thought you said that the palaeontologic commission was a secret," i challenged. "why would they have put out an official field report?"
_
"not report," darren corrected me. he pulled out the drawer this one had come from to show me it was full of similar documents. "but reports!"
_
"funny you should ask that, traumador," darren continued. "i wondered the same thing. at first it looked as though the geologic survey was trying to publish the findings of, but yet hide, the commission's scientific activities by claiming them as actions of some of sternberg's people (who were the canadian team in the rush)."
_
"wouldn't that ruin a cover up?" i wondered out loud. i would make the worst super spy ever people of the innerweb... i can hardly keep track of what's going on around me right now, that alone around other people. that alone try to picture what WILL happen to all these variables. yet even i knew publishing these field reports would catch someone's attention! as was clear by darren knowing about them...
_
"exactly," darren agreed with me. "in fact in 1918 there was a massive uproar within the geologic survey when these field reports were brought to the administrations’ attention."
_
darren pulled me out another larger photo. it looked like one of the men from the dig picture of my birth site, but i couldn't tell what he looked like. where his face should have been there was a hole.
_
"it turned out these reports had all be filed and published by this man. francis slate. a key agent of the commission, possibly THE key agent! by the time the survey found out what he'd been doing it was too late. too many copies of the reports had been printed and distributed. for them to get all of the copies back they'd have raised immediate attention to their contents. instead they just left them mixed in with the sternberg's reports where they went largely unnoticed for years," darren informed me.

"why would he want them published in the first place?" i asked. "won't that break his cover?"

"i don't know," darren confessed. "it's only one of the many things i'd like to know about this man!"

"if i had to guess, as the reports are only on scientifically important sites, i think he just wanted them to be known by other people," darren informed. "slate seldom ever collected things himself. on occasion he did alert the american and canadian teams to skeletons, but many of his sites were well outside their operating area! if he hadn't recorded these other sites they might have remained unknown forever."
_
"for example he records, though rather cryptically, at your site... the presence of eggshell!" darren pointed to the report. holly smokes! he was right!!! this predated the first official discovery of dinosaur eggs in canada, at devil's coulee, by well over three quarters of a century!
_
"did he get in a lot of trouble?" i hesitantly asked, thinking how much trouble i'd gotten into for when i screwed up. i figured messing up a big conspiracy would lead to way worse punishments.
_
"no," darren said matter of factly. before i could ask he added. "he'd been dead nearly a year before the survey discovered the reports."
_
"slate died at the end of the dinosaur rush. with the withdraw of all the fossil hunters, annex didn't have the same cover he'd enjoyed up till than, and the outbreak of world war one made it difficult to ship to europe anyways. the lord pulled out of canada. due to this the geologic survey shut down the commission. all a few months after slate died." darren said sadly, as though this francis slate was a friend of his.
_
"you okay?" i sympathized.
_
"yes," darren said putting on a fake smile. "i just think it's tragic that the exploits of this man have been deliberately forgotten. in fact his whole life has been wiped out. there are no records of him before 1912," darren pointed to the photo i held in my claws. "there isn't even a good photo of him. any closeups of him have had his face destroyed or distorted on purpose. i'm sure for security purposes back than, but now that just means he is spectre of history."
_
there was a sombre silence between us for a minute. "anyways about 6 years ago i made a real effort to try and find out as much about francis slate as i could. him, and this lord annex, are the biggest unknown players in alberta's palaeontology left. to do this i recruited as much help as i could get to try and find francis' field report sites," darren told me.
_
"among this help was a person and a dinosaur you know. craig and larry," he emphasised.
_
"craig had been helping me with my lost quarry project [post on this ubber soon promise!] for a while. so i gave him your site's field report to check out that week. as for larry i have no idea why he suddenly took interest in field work, but when he heard we were checking around huxley he insisted that he was coming to help. i needed all the help i could get, and i wasn't not arguing with a fully grown tyrannosaur," darren levelled with me. "so we all went our seperate ways in the morning, and by the end of the day next thing i knew craig came back to field camp with 9 field jacketed eggs, and you hatched and wrapped up in his hoodie."

if a tyrannosaur could cry i would have shed a tear there. fortunately for me we don't actually cry tears... though due to my hanging around humans i have picked up some of your emotional expressions, and i gave away my vulnerability by sniffling.
_
trying to change subjects to distract from my emotional moment i asked. "did you find out anything more about slate?"

"nope," darren said slightly resigned. "you and this drawer hold everything i was ever able to find out about francis slate. i gave up a few years ago, and am sticking with lost quarries that won't led to dead ends," with that he took back the papers from me, and put them back into the drawer which i than noticed he had double locking on.
_
well i had a few more answers about where i came from. at the same time i had some way bigger questions too. i was not feeling too chipper, as darren started to plug away at his puter.
_
i took this as my cue to leave. just as i was about to head out the door from behind me darren offered. "i have a free morning tomorrow," he had loaded a map onto the screen. "would you like to go see the site?" which i pointed to...

would i!?!?!
before you knew it i saying thank you over and over again, while shaking his hand so hard his voice came out funny when he asked me to stop.

it was set! tomorrow i'd have the master of finding lost dig sites take me to where i was dug up! though i knew in the small logic part of my head it won't answer all my questions, i still felt like tomorrow i'd finally know where i came from...

to be continued... where it ALL began!

(Production Note: Much of this post is fictional. References to Traumador's egg, the Palaeotolgic Commission, and Francis Slate are not real. Information on the Huxley Tyrannosaur IS factual though, and based on real events. The only fiction around this Tyrannosaur's history is Francis Slate's involvement with its discovery. In reality it WAS discovered by Charlie Sternberg in 1946 and dug up as described.)

28.12.08

brooding on my origins (origins part 1)

well i'm beginning to think that i'm not going to learn the identity of whoever bought me the plane ticket, for my 5th hatching day present, that has brought me back here to drumheller. whoever they are they've been going to great effort to lie low. so much so that no one else around here know about or even suspected i might show up.

now don't get me wrong, people of the web wide world, its been a fun trip home. however just some of the time. without anyone to specifically hangout with, its getting a little boring. as no one was expecting me to be here everyone is busy with work, and as the royal tyrrell museum is really busy i can't really tag along with anyone too long before i get in the way...

meaning i'm starting to get on everyone's nerves... that is till today when i made a fortuitous stop by the education department.

i popped up there on the hunt for anyone not currently working. i hit pay dirt, with my two former co-workers tony and yumi both on lunch break. one of the very rare times an educator at the museum gets to sit down and do nothing... even than their usually eating while preparing for the next program, tour, or hike of their day...

i was excited. this was going to mean i had someone to talk to/hang out with, if even for just a few minutes anyways. as cool a place as the museum is it can't really thrill or occupy you for days and days on end. so some social interaction was going to be a nice change for today.

at first it was a nice little chat about what tony and yumi had been up to throughout the day. a few dinosite tours (that's a guided tour to a real dinosaur bonebed), a excavate it (a simulated dig for the public), a couple fossil castings, and a kids day camp finishing off the afternoon. than suddenly the conversation turned to what i'd been doing...

that was a little awkward. i admitted to pretty much the same thing i'd been doing the last few days. bumming around the museum, and basically bugging anyone i found in the middle of a spare moment.

tony agreed. "yeah i'd been noticing that man," he observed, and than politely warned. "not that i personally mind, it's great seeing you around here again man, but some of the big wigs, well they're starting to get mad at you for reenacting the old days."

that wasn't good. i didn't want to strain my otherwise bad relations with the museum anymore. afterall making the people who fired you even madder wouldn't do me any favours. especially since the world museum community was a pretty small one...

than tony made a great suggestion. "what you need to do is find something that'll keep you out of trouble." he noted wisely. though a second later kinda undid the wise guy aura he'd built up. "though i'm not sure what?"

it was a great idea, but what could i do at the museum that i had never done before?... i mean i had lived here for two years afterall!

yumi made a suggestion that was a little obvious. "you could always use this as a chance to learn more about palaeontology," which i appreciated, but having gone through the galleries like a million times this week there wasn't much more i was going to learn in there.

just as i was about to politely ask her for a different idea, yumi put down one of the many books the ed department has and suggested. "you could start by looking up some stuff in one of these," she cheerfully advised. "even though i know lots, there's always more to learn, and i find at least one new fact in a book a day!"

well it sounded like a fine enough idea, and i saw no reason not to try it. however it wasn't going to keep me occupied all day, that alone for the next few weeks i was stuck in drum. with a brain as small as mine reading and learning can only go on so long before i get overwhelmed.

i worried that asking for another suggestion would hurt yumi's feelings, but i was going to have to ask for more... that was till i noticed the picture on the page yumi had just happened to open the book too. it was a picture of a dinosaur embryo in an egg.
_
suddenly i had one of those light bulbs turning on inside my brain moments! yumi was totally right. just not in a general sense like she had been talking in.

i'd always wanted to know where i'd come from, and why i was here in this the human world. now was the perfect chance to find out. where else but here at one of the top palaeontologic institutions in the world could i find out why i'd fossilized!!!

yumi and tony both had to run off to their various programs shortly thereafter, but i hardly noticed. i'd leapt full on into the education library... well okay i didn't actually leap. that would have damaged the books and probably me come to think of it... reading everything and anything i could about dinosaur eggs and nests. trying to find any references to vivus-fossils or my own egg's discovery.

i didn't find anything about me specifically, but i did learn a lot that i hadn't known before. you hear about dinosaur eggs all the time. yet at the same time beyond the fact that dinosaurs laid them and we find them i didn't know anything about them.

with this new knowledge added to that i'd gather back during my first look into my origins at the devil's coulee fossil nesting site i was starting to get a picture of how dinosaur eggs fossilized and were preserved into the present.

however being that i was at a museum with world class researchers on staff, who better to ask than the dinosaur egg expert just down the hall?!?
_
so i popped by the office of my old palaeontologist buddy dr. françois therrien, curator of dinosaur palaeoecology. his job is to look at anything and everything to do with how dinosaurs lived. whether that be their environment or them themselves.
_
françois was very welcoming when i showed up at his door with no appointment. he shook my hand when i came into his office, and of course like everyone else here in canada, wanted to know what i'd been doing with myself when i left. as for françois, he'd been really busy being a scientists and publishing tons of stuff while i was away.
_
with that out of the way i didn't want to waste his time and got to business. i wanted to know about dinosaur eggs. everything and anything he knew about them. which as luck would have it he knows a lot about. him and his research associate darla zelenitsky (who herself specializes on just dinosaur eggs... too bad she is based in calgary or i'd have double the experts!) have published a few papers on dinosaur eggs and nests in the last couple years.
_
françois was more than happy to not only share his immense knowledge, but even showed me some cool as specimens. like this nest, that was just in the news. he thinks it might be a dromaeosaurid nest.
_
man françois is the dude! totally dropping everything to help me out for an hour. without an appointment or anything! palaeontologists are the best...
_
that and he knows his stuff! i found out there was so much we do, and at the same time don't know about dinosaur eggs!!!

so the easiest way to relay this is through a...

okay, so to start off with dinosaurs, like our relatives the reptiles (our ancestors) and the birds (our descendants), have babies by, well, getting eggnant. which results in the mommies laying eggs, and the babies having to figure out a way to get out of them. which as i recall was a bit of a workout to say the least!
_
fossil eggs were actually discovered by science a lot earlier than most books tell you. for some reason the myth has developed that roy chapman andrews found the first dinosaur eggs in the 1920's, but this is NOT true. the first scientifically recognized dinosaur eggs were found in france in 1859, but as these were not as heavily publicized as those of andrews' they were overshadowed by the american museum of natural histories' heavy publicity of their find in the 20's.
_
since 1859 dinosaur eggs have been found on every continent except anarctica (more just because it is too cold in the present for people to properly wander around looking for fossils). don't let this world-wide coverage fool you though. there is a LOT we still don't know and need to find out about how dinosaurs laid their young...
_
one of the biggest gaps in our knowledge is who laid what. at moment we only have eggs from 1-2% of all known dinosaur types, and some of these eggs may be from types we haven't found proper fossils of either!
_
it can be (note i said can, not always!) impossible to be certain which dinosaur laid which egg due to there being no relation between a fossil skeleton and an egg. this is the same problem with linking dinosaur footprints to their maker. though we can guess at what soft tissue covered the bone we can not be certain, and thus even with close match of foot bones to footprints it can not be a sure thing.
_
unlike footprints though there is one sure way to link an egg to a family of dinosaur. that is finding an embryonic skeleton inside an egg (which is rare!). with the fossilized bones of a baby you can tell for sure whose egg it is, but this is the ONLY sure way to this.
_
in the past when egg sites were found to have adult bones of a dinosaur with the nest it was thought to be evidence of whose eggs these were. a famous case of this was roy chapman's eggs. they were found with protoceratops nearby, and assumed to be theirs. so that when the proper parents were found close to a similar nest it was thought to be stealing these eggs. so poor oviraptor got its name of egg thief due to misreading the fossil evidence.
_
most of the dinosaur eggs that have been found so far are from the end of the dinosaurs era in the later cretaceous. which seems odd. granted that's not to say no eggs have been found from the triassic or jurassic. there have been, but the majority are from the late cretaceous.
_
there are a number of theories on why this might be. it seems no coincidence that all of the dinosaur eggs so far found all have hard calcium shells. many palaeontologists believe this might show many dinosaur eggs didn't fossilize because they were a softer "leathery" eggshell.
_
environment changes going on in the late cretaceous may account for why more dinosaurs developed harder shells as time went on. at the same time there is no evidence to prove or disprove this, but it is an interesting suggestion.
_
the fact we have fossil eggs at all is extraordinary in and of itself though. when you think about an egg it is really just a thin shell, even if that shell is made of hard stuff. the fossil record has always been one of mostly hard things. so the more breakable or fall aparty you are the less likely you are to fossilize.
_
one of the other problems is that dinosaurs being land dwelling creatures, they tended to live in heavily vegetated places. well plants when they die and break down tend to make acid. though it is low enough to not usually effect bone (except in coal seams) egg shell being so thin would tend to dissolve if buried in such rocks.
_
only in environments that lacked this acid build up like the desert of cretaceous mongolia, or like the snail and clam rich deposits of devil's coulee above (note the eggshell in the centre of the pic and the snail shell right above it). these shells created an extra source of calcium that would buffer the shells and keep them from dissolving in the acid.
_
this also helps account for the rarity of dinosaur eggs. especially if not all of them were hard calcium but made of leathery shells instead!
_
from those dinosaur eggs we have found several different types of nesting and parental care have come to light.
_
immediately some dinosaurs clearly just dug a hole laid their eggs in it, and than left. leaving their babies to fend of themselves.
_
others such as this nest above showed more effort in the construction of the nest, and evidence the parents tended to the eggs at least until they hatched.
_
in this picture you can see how all the eggs have been arranged in a circular fashion which would have allowed a parent to sit on the top of the nest and keep them warm. something we call brooding in modern birds. in some dinosaurs care was placed into the laying arrangement, but due to the adults big size, vegetation was used to keep the eggs warm instead (otherwise the parent might crush their eggs!).
_
there have been some recent debates about how to interpret and detect a nest versus a hole. this makes sense as we are not finding the nest as it was made millions of years ago, but rather its buried remains. as nests are often buried by soils and sediment similar or identical to that which they are made of, seeing the before and after can be difficult to impossible.
_
there is a lot more specific detail i could try to tell you, but i don't get it all, and it's all about specific types of dinosaur eggs. since non of these are tyrannosaur eggs i'll finish here.
needless to say dinosaur eggs are an exciting and still wide open field of palaeontology!

now i have a lot more a base with which to try and figure out where and how my egg was preserved and than turned into a vivus-fossil i decided my next step talk to the one guy here at the museum who would know how my egg was found. than hopefully i'd have some answers!
_
to be continued... in the tale of three discoveries!

26.12.08

fossil of the weekend! #7

replica skeleton of a hypacrosaur embyro from the devil's coulee dinosaur heritage museum in southren alberta.

25.12.08

my favourite comic strip

one of my favourite things to read on the innerweb is the burgess shale themed comic strip walcott's quarry over on etrilobite. with help from my buddies at prehistoric insanity i've written
my own strip with lovely art by prehistoric insanity digital.

check it out...



also be sure to check out the REAL walcott's quarry today!

happy x-mas!

in my quest to figure out what makes humans tick, one thing i have noticed is that they love to take time off. in order to do that they come up with special days throughout the year to have a break on.

one of the biggest of those is x-mas. which i know is famous for people getting presents, but i've never gotten any before.

that is till this x-mas! a box of presents showed up for me!!!

the only bad thing is that much like the plane ticket i got for my 5th hatching day, i have no idea who sent me them. though based on the hand writing it is the SAME person...

apart from this mystery element it made this x-mas my most memorable.

i got this awesome mini-poster of diplodocus carnegiei.

a nice tyrannosaur skeleton shot. i only hope my skull looks as dashing as this one shown.

a mug shot of my cousin larry. i guess it's the thought that counts... i can only hope they don't know we're related or hate each other in that case.

the highlight of the box was this wrapped item. cool. i don't get things encased in paper often.

i'd like to say unwrapping it was fun... well okay, it was fun, but it wasn't easy. that's a better way to word it.
_
getting the paper off with arms as small as mine isn't easy, and add to that my claws... i had some pretty shredded paper... which may also have happened when in frustration of my fingers getting stuck in the present i kinda instinctively bite it too...
_
it was worth it though...
_
it was a really funny lollipop! man i laughed so hard. extinction sucks... get it?!? best pun ever!
_
to all of you out there on the innerweb have a great x-mas too!

19.12.08

fossil of the weekend! #6

a pair of dimetrodon skeletons at the royal tyrrell museum.

18.12.08

camping away from... no wait, at home (homecoming part 4)

after the more than somewhat depressing results of my efforts to figure out who bought me the plane ticket back here to drumheller for my my 5th hatching day, i was kinda wanting something fun to happen...

well this afternoon it did happen, well in a way. i'm starting to find this whole coming home thing to be a mix of coolness and unfortunately some sadness.

as she promised the other day, my old coworker amy tracked me down after this week's session of summer camp was done. man i haven't seen amy in a long time!

it was awesome catching up with her. though like everyone around here she thought my having ran off to the other side of the world was more interesting than her life... i should tape record the story. i've been having to tell it a lot!
_
i sort forgot how funny amy was (i didn't really forget, but because it's been a while i wasn't used to it anymore if you follow what i mean...) it was really enjoyable being reminded of it!
our catching up was the biggest highlight of the trip so far. i really enjoyed the afternoon.
yet at the same time it made me a little sad. talking to amy reminded me of when we used to "hangout" in the old days...
_
the times when we both worked at camp!
_
the royal tyrrell museum's badlands science camp to be precise!
_
the most dinosaur and fossil packed summer camp you'll find anywhere. that and one of the awesomest summer camps anywhere too... well that's what craig said anyway, and if anyone would know it's him. he's worked at few camps.
_
back than i was one happy camper... well okay staffer. i might have hung around camp alot with the kids, but i wasn't really camping officially speaking. i was merely an employee (slash resident) of the museum (and being a resident it kinda felt like i camped at the museum... all the time hehehehe).
_
the job was so fun though that with my small brain i'd forget sometimes. so even though i might have been wearing a staff shirt (like always!) i could just as easily have been wearing one of the kids' orange hats!
_
so what was my job at science camp you might ask? well it's not an easy one to answer.
my old job at the museum had been to hangout in the cretaceous garden as a saurian part of the greenhouse, and educate/entertain visitors. what that amounted to really was me pretending to be a statue. from management's point of view that made sense.
_
due to my ability to speak in english and that i usually did so without thinking much about what i said the higher ups, well, they thought it was best i didn't talk to the tourists. of course due to my small brain size i often forgot these instructions, and well the boss dudes they got sick of it, and decided to stick me somewhere the people i talked to might appreciate it. even if i didn't often know what i was talking about...
_
which is why i ended up at camp. the big cheeses thought that kids won't mind a pea brained t-rex getting stuff wrong all the time... on that count they were wrong. kids can be way smarter than adults a lot of the time... that alone tyrannosaurs!
_
at the same time kids LOVE me... i wish it was them running things instead of adults. than we dinosaurs would get some respect in the human world!
_
anyways, i was one of the science camp educators. which meant i was supposed to help out the camp staff lead educational programs and activities... i say supposed to, because well, often i didn't actually get what we were doing or what i supposed to talk about right...
_
like for example here where the idea was me talking about what science is... i tended to have to get everyone else working at camp to correct me before i'd get it right... man how embarrassing.
_

one of the guys i worked with a lot was strong-man the strongest dude on earth. don't believe me? just look at his colossal muscles!

we used to tag team on leading stuff in the fossil lab. there were all kinds of cool things the kids would get to do there. here we were leading fossil casting. the kids got to make replicas of actual fossils and take home the copy!

lucky ducks. i never got to keep anything from work... oh right, they weren't working...

_
now strong-man ,he was a lab expert... well okay except for his wearing shorts and open holed shoes in the lab... otherwise a real expert (besides the fossil lab was the lab for the public and not very dangerous... as for the real prep labs in the museum. well me and strong-man weren't allowed in them for various reasons. broken fossil reasons. me on account of being less than smart. strong-man on account of accidental crushing a few things with his HUGE might!)
_
i on the other hand was... well, not so much of an expert!
_
i was entertaining though! the kids loved me, and the only thing they loved more than me was my dr. phil currie puppet!
_
man i love puppets. they crack me up, and the kids thought like me... which is funny cause again they're usually a lot smarter than me. how could we be thinking alike with such different sized brains?
_
sadly strong-man didn't like my dr. phil currie puppet as much as the kids.
_
he also didn't like it when i took things too literally... which i don't get. when you're talking shouldn't you mean what you say, and say what you mean?
_
like this time when strong-man said fossils tell stories about the past just like books tell stories. i thought that was silly. books don't tell stories. they don't laugh. they don't sing. they don't do anything! they just sit there and go like this... well that in the picture.
_
i get what he meant now. though i stand by my confusion back than. you read stories from books. they don't tell you them. the effort is up to YOU!
_
anyways sadly our lab sessions almost always ended in strong-man losing his cool at me... which is too bad as he is a real cool dude. just not when he's angry. i really don't like him when he's angry. the angrier strong-man gets the stronger strong-man gets!... which kinda bugged me. it wasn't my fault...
_
not that it bugged the kids. they thought it was funny! which i guess it probably was. i just at the time didn't think so. i kinda thought at times they were laughing at me...
_
fortunately it wasn't all stuff i had no clue about. i also got to do the dinosaurs of alberta talk. if there is one thing i've always known a lot about its dinosaurs!

of course there were lots of other fun activities that the campers would do that i wouldn't have to do much for, cause none of the staff trusted me with anything serious.

i really liked the canoeing. we got to reenact how the old time palaeontologists explored this area. back than they didn't have roads to drive around on. the only easy way to get into the heart of the badlands was by the river that carved them.

which was the sort of trip we'd go on with the kids. including some authentic fossil hunting on the shore! in the middle of no where (the best place to find fossils)!!!

_
okay i liked the canoe trips... sometimes the poor camper stuck on the boat with me didn't like it as much. i wasn't the best navigator... sure i'd been canoeing a lot by the end of my camp summers, but you try paddling with arms as small as mine and we'll talk okay!!!

the kids also got to see lots of stuff the normal museum visitor wouldn't be allowed to. like tours of both the collections AND preparation labs.

i learned a lot about real palaeontology while hanging out with the kids on these tours. learning from real scientists and technicians, like my pal caleb (whose now training to be a real palaeontologist... i'll have to look him up while i'm here in canada!)... though the campers sometimes complained cause i asked more questions than them, and sometimes didn't stop when it wasn't my turn anymore...

still me and the campers were buds by the end of any day. again unless the staff needed me to do something in particular, i was just like one of the kids and hung out with them mostly.

doing all the stuff they did... which come to think of it, with the amount of arts and crafts i did you'd think i'd have learned to draw or paint or something cool like that!?!

i think it was doing all that stuff at camp that started to make me grow up a bit. when i began working at camp i was 2 years old, and i left just after my 3rd hatching day (yeah one year on the calender, but TWO whole summers at camp). in t-rex years that had me going into "teenage"dom (though as a t-rex making it to your teens makes you OLD!).

everyday at camp was full of adventure, and you were always doing some different and new. even if you worked there all summer! i'm serious, at the end of a summer after 6 separate camps doing roughly the same thing, it never felt like the same thing! that and i worked it twice, remember people of the web wide world. it WAS different everytime, even if on paper they were all the same!...

the thing i miss the most about working camp though was it was the first time i was treated equally by humans. i wasn't just a specimen or display at the museum. i was part of a team, and depended on by the camp team EXTREME! (that was what we camp staffers used to call ourselves).

amy noticed me zoning out into the past, and brought me back to the present. after i told her i wanted to work camp again she sympathized. amy had just come from helping take camp down. the kids had all gone back home, and camp was done for the season.

ah nuts...

though don't get me wrong people of the innerweb. it was super awesome to visit with amy. we had fun going over old memories and stories, and remembering all our camp friends who'd since left drumheller.

sure it was sad to think those days were over, and they were never coming back, but it reminded me that new adventures must be just around the corner.

which i guess i was going to need to find. with no sign of who ever brought me back here, and everyone i knew around town leaving what was i going to do? i had a lot more time in drum to kill this trip, and it seemed i was fast running out of people to catch up with. amy was leaving after this catch and and heading home too...

though an idea was occurred to me people of the innerweb. sure all the people of my past weren't sticking around, but my past itself can't go anywhere. i'm thinking maybe i should look into it!

what do you think?