A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours.
Is just staggering. I'm old(ish), and not in the frantic startup-race culture that's sometimes pervasive here, but still find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight. I feel they did the right thing when naming the dinosaur after him. Respect.
Speaking of interesting dinosaur names, my other favorite has got to be the Atlascopcosaurus [1], named after Swedish industry tooling company Atlas Copco [2] who sponsored the particular dig (in 1984) when it was found with equipment.
Frankly, this feels like my career right now :D (i.e. kinda senior in an individual contributor role without a daily team collaboratin as such, which means I don't have to run around doing standups, but have gazillion lines of code to maintain and not much time for greenfield development).
Honestly, this seems like a refreshingly honest take on life. Pounding rocks like a convict, is where its at! No?
b) Thats also why it took 7000 hours to do. It's really fucking hard, and he wanted to get it as right as possible. That means going very slow, taking a lot of care, and not taking shortcuts to put sculpting into play.
And licking it, it seems :)
Note, do not let the above take away the work experts do. While a 8 year old can do it, those are the easy cases, and a few "hammer slips" don't matter. There is a level of detail that trained hands can do better. There are many types of rocks that can hold fossils, and not all are easy as limestone to work with (limestone is the majority though).
Not true (see OP!), but the odds of finding something interesting are very small.
I do not mean to diminish the level of discipline and patience required, just to point that the fantasy you have about your work is much more important than the work itself, and that there is a lot of beauty into that task, certainly much more than in creating data pipelines to decide how to better trick unsuspecting web users to click on ads (and there, again, people who do that kind of thing probably have a very different fantasy than mine).
Despite the pace of operations, one particular shovel operator, Shawn Funk, happened to notice something after taking a big chunk out of the cliff. It was thanks to him and several people within Suncor that operations stopped in that area and the Royal Tyrrell was notified.
It is by far the best dinossaur museum in the world and also has a fine exhibition on the Burgess Shale, one the best fossil sites in the world for the Cambrian Revolution.
The only other claim to fame for the town of Drumheller is the band Nickelback was formed close by. But that's something most Canadians don't like to talk about.
I watched a doco once on why everyone hates them. It was interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard their music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3rXdeOvhNE
Sorry.
https://www.tyrrellmuseumshop.com/collections/category-2
I came across this online shop somehow a few years ago, and thought it would be hilarious to order from the museum shop of a museum I’ve never even been to, and in a country I haven’t been to either at that.
Not sure where I have those dinosaur T-shirts now but I wore them every now and then for a few years at least :) The T-Rex Skeleton T-shirt being my favourite among the ones I bought from there.
https://www.tyrrellmuseumshop.com/collections/category-2/pro...
Drumheller was one of the filming locations for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
The Star Trek museum originally located in Vulcan, Alberta is now in Drumheller.
Head-Smashed-in-Buffalo Jump is nearby too and kind of a hidden gem. [1]
https://i.natgeofe.com/n/e5966d6a-e93c-4f3d-839f-a228f34fdb3...
The second image in the original Ars Technica article shows the side view of its head/face very clearly. According to the caption: its head is still partly enclosed in the concretion it was found in — which IMO gives it the appearance of having its head resting on a rock.
After looking at that, and the third image — an artist's rendition of how it might have looked when alive — the first image should make more sense: its snout is at the front of the image, the bulges of both its eye sockets are clearly visible slightly further back, and the creature looks like it is laying down (and has been somewhat flattened) facing towards the camera, looking slightly to the right of the photographer.
HTH.
clear cookies > refresh works :)
This is an ankylosaur which was a heavily armored dinosaur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur
this article is from The NY Times and I am only linking to it because the first photo in that article is an amazing fossil of a feather. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/science/dinosaur-feather-...
There was a large variety. An extremely large variety. As much as we are understandably excited about feathers being a thing that we didn't realize earlier, in 100+ million years a lot of things evolve. They didn't all have feathers.
I know what you're trying to say, but every living thing today, from the mammals to the fungus among us, have spent the same amount of time evolving, dating back to the first life, or at least the first life encoded for reproduction. Except for the birds, the dinosaurs quit early.
100 million years is an extremely long time. A lot happens in that amount of time.
during that period of time, the ancestors of every living thing on earth was also mutating and naturally selecting.
during the entire time the dinosaurs roamed the earth, the mammals and/or their ancestors were also evolving and saving up genetic endowment for being the fittest in every eventuality; sadly, the dinosaurs bet on the wrong ... horses.
[1] One specie or a few species? I'm really curious about the current most popular hypothesis.
https://dino.fandom.com/wiki/Dracorex/Gallery?file=National-...
Surely this is nonsense.
You cannot tell the depths that a living creature swam, from the mineral deposits on its fossilised body!
I mean, if I drown and my dead body comes to rest deeper than 50 meters, and then several trillion of years later my fossilised body is uncovered with glauconite all over it, you would be wrong to deduce that I swam 50 metres under the sea.
> But Brown and his colleagues discovered something completely unexpected: Borealopelta’s coloring may have helped keep it camouflaged in its environment. The team found evidence that the animal used countershading, meaning that the coloration of its body was darker on the top and tapering into a lighter underbelly.
Oh please. How is it possible to deduce the colouring of a fossilised creature? The creature itself is gone - its just stone. You can no more do this, than tell the colour of a man's eyes from his footprint.
> Surely this is nonsense.
It is not, though the problem here seems to be that you have badly misread it.
> You cannot tell the depths that a living creature swam, from the mineral deposits on its fossilized body!
Probably not, but this isn’t saying anything about the depths that a living creature swam, but the depths to which the corpse of a land-walking creature sank.
The three paragraphs before the one you quoted about how far it went (after death, not in life), with some marked ellisions for brevity:
A land-based megaherbivore preserved in an ancient seabed is not as uncommon as one might think. […] Scientists suspect its carcass may have been carried from a river to the sea in a flooding event; it may have bobbed at the surface upside-down for a few days before sinking into the ocean depths.
It would have been kept at the surface by what’s referred to as “bloat-and-float,” as the buildup of postmortem gasses would keep it buoyant. Modeling done by Henderson indicates its heavy armor would have rolled it onto its back, a position he suspects may have prevented ocean predators from scavenging its carcass.
Once the gases that kept it floating were expelled, Borealopelta sank to the ocean floor, landing on its back.
> Oh please. How is it possible to deduce the colouring of a fossilized creature?
“One way to determine an organism’s coloration has been to examine the structure of fossilized melanosomes under the microscope. Melanosomes are small storage sacs within cells that store pigment. Two main flavors of pigments are found in animal tissues called eumelanin and pheomelanin.[…] Classically, scientists have examined the microscopic structure to distinguish between eumelanosomes and pheomelanosomes. However, these structures are often difficult to distinguish microscopically and mineralized microbes can often be mistaken for these organelles. […]
“The genius of Wogelius and his collaborators was to study the chemistry of eumelanin and pheomelanin from modern surviving organisms and then apply what they found to ancient samples. It turns out that each form of melanin has a distinctive associated element – copper for eumelanin and zinc for pheomelanin. X-ray beams can be bounced off the fossil melanosomes, and the way they are reflected depends on the different elements of these pigments. The exact distribution of eumelanin and pheomelanin can be mapped onto a fossil’s structure, providing something like a ‘paint for numbers’ for the fossils! This technique has already been used to paint a picture of an extinct red mouse that lived 3 million years ago. Now investigators hope to use the technique to go even further back in time to capture pictures of the earliest organisms to roam the planet.”
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/color-dinosaur-actua...