Tales told by a toddler tyrannosaur

Cover of the issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in which our Tarbosaurus research is the Featured Article. It's open access and freely downloadable!

Really young animals are always interesting to scientists, because they often shake up long-held notions based on the better-known attributes of adults. Youngsters are doubly interesting to paleontologists because they’re so rare. So, when the beautifully preserved, almost complete skull of a young Tarbosaurus came into the lab, we knew we had an important specimen. It was brought to the WitmerLab in early 2007 by Takanobu Tsuihiji, who had joined us as a postdoctoral fellow in 2006. Taka had participated in the joint expedition to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia led by the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences and the Mongolian Paleontological Center. The first of our studies on this specimen just appeared as the open-access Featured Article in the May 2011 issue of The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Others, such as Brian Switek and Jaime Headden, have also blogged about this article, and so I’ll try to focus on more of the back story from an inside perspective. We provide more resources on our university site, as well as a photo album on our WitmerLab Facebook page.

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Exploiting dinosaurs—embracing public outreach as a mission of a research lab. Part 1: Why do outreach?

Not many research labs have an actual mission statement, but we kinda came up with one when we first launched our Facebook page: “WitmerLab: 21st century approaches to fleshing out the past. — Our mission is to use the structure of extinct and modern-day animals to interpret evolutionary history…and to share that history with the broader community.” This is the first of a two-part post devoted to the last part of that statement. Here we look at why we jumped into the public arena, and the next post will explore what we’ve been doing. We recently returned from the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology where we presented a poster entitled “Promoting a culture of outreach within an active university research lab setting: WitmerLab at Ohio University,” as part of the SVP Education & Outreach special poster session, and so the topic is fresh.

WitmerLab poster for the 2010 SVP Education and Outreach poster session. Larger JPG: http://bit.ly/bsTqvB . PDF: http://bit.ly/95fHSc .

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Taller dinosaurs, cautionary cartilaginous tales, and happy endings

Casey Holliday measuring ostrich bones (2001).

A project that got its start way back in WitmerLab’s Triassic Period finally came to fruition, thanks to the professionalism and perseverance of lead author Casey Holliday. Today, in the freely available, open-access online journal PLoS ONE, we published an article (Holliday et al. 2010) on the caps of cartilage (known as epiphyses) that form the articulations between the long bones of dinosaurs and their modern-day archosaurian relatives (birds and crocs). For a long time, paleontologists had looked at the ends of dinosaur bones like the femur or humerus and suspected that something might be missing. The bones’ ends looked poorly formed, almost too simple, or were covered with a rough pattern of bumps and grooves. The logical conclusion was that many of these bones must have been covered with pretty significant amounts of cartilage.

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