More Philly dino news

["Sherry Michael" <_smichael@excite.com>]

Heh, it looks like little ANSP is back in the dino business. We're going to
have to buy cots and live in the prep lab. Can I be more excited? I'm sorry
I can't say anything more except pass along public info. Otherwise those
cuties at UPenn will leave a sauropod head in my bed (grin). 

Pictures can be found for today at:
www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Jul/11/front_page/DINO11.htm

After sunday go to www.phillynews.com, click on the "inquirer" tab and
choose "sunday". The team was on the front page.

-Sherry Michael

**************


Phila. team's accidental find. 

                                                                Unearthing
dinosaurs
By Mark Jaffe
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

 PRYOR MOUNTAINS, Mont. - Jason Poole, heeding the call of nature, made a
quick trip to the bushes and the next thing he knew, he had found a rare
carnivorous dinosaur.

Now, the dinosaur was not lurking in the bushes here in the Montana nowhere,
but rather it was buried under gray shale and green sagebrush.

 Still, Poole's sharp eye spotted a telltale bone and won for his
dinosaur-hunting expedition - a joint venture by the University of
Pennsylvania and
                           Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences - a
major find.

After three days of excavation, the team of paleontologists early this month
uncovered a rare and possibly new Jurassic predator.

Poole already has dubbed it Urinator montanus.

The animal, which lived 145 million years ago, was about 15 feet long and
had incredibly large hands tipped with spiky claws.

Seven types of Jurassic meat-eating dinosaurs have been found in different
parts of the West in the geological formation in which the Philadelphia team
was working.

But only one of those is really well-known, the Allosaurus. The rest have
been identified by a few bones here, a tooth there.

The Philadelphia expedition has unearthed almost 50 bones, including legs,
arms, hips and even part of the skull.

The paleontologists are not sure what kind of dinosaur they have. It might
be a young Allosaurus or it could be a Coelurus - a relatively small,
lightly built carnivorous dinosaur.

They will not know for certain until the bones reach Philadelphia. The find
was excavated in four large blocks - each weighing about 150 pounds - that
were encased in plaster and
trucked out last week.

Poole, manager of the Academy's paleontology lab, will unravel the fossils
so paleontologists can figure out what it really is.

The public will be able to see Poole and Matt Lamanna, a Penn graduate
student, prepare the bones in the Academy's Dinosaur Hall later this month.

However, one thing is certain: It definitely is a theropod - a two-footed,
meat-eating dinosaur. 

"Theropods, theropods. Everybody wants theropods, but not everybody can get
them," said Peter Dodson, the Penn paleontologist who headed the team.

But while the question of what kind of theropod is coming to Philadelphia
remains to be answered, an equally curious question is how did Poole and
company get to that particular
Montana hilltop in the first place?

To answer that, one has to go back some 30 years and start with a 5-year-old
boy named Will Tillett and the distinguished Yale paleontologist John
Ostrom.



In the 1960s, Ostrom turned up in nearby Lovell, Wyo., searching for
dinosaurs. Eventually, he spent several summers hunting on the Tillett
ranch.

The Yale professor even named one of his dinosaurs in honor of the family,
Tenontosaurus tilletti.

Little Will tagged along with Ostrom and developed a taste and an eye for
fossil hunting. It was a hobby he kept up, even when he started ranching
himself.

A few years ago, when Tillett heard an old story about 1950s uranium hunters
finding a skull just across the state border in Montana, he decided to scout
it out. Sure enough, the area
looked like a fertile fossil field.

Last fall, he took his father-in-law up to the spot, and they found a large
leg bone.

It just so happens that Tillett's father-in-law is William Donawick, a
professor at Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine.

Donawick brought the bone back to Philadelphia and showed it to Dodson, who
besides being one of the nation's foremost dinosaur paleontologists teaches
anatomy at the veterinary
school.

Dodson took one look at the bone and began figuring how he was going to get
a team into the field this summer.

During the 1980s, Dodson had explored Careless Creek, Mont., with great
success, finding a new horned dinosaur, which he named Avaceratops lammersi,
and excavating bones by
the thousands.

But since the site was closed in 1992, Dodson had not been back to the West.
Indefatigably jolly, with blue eyes, an auburn goatee, and a penchant for
singing show tunes while digging
up dinosaurs, Dodson stitched together funding from the university, the
Academy and a private donor.

On June 20, his team left Philadelphia for Lovell. It included Poole;
Donawick; Lamanna; Allison Tumarkin, a Penn graduate student; and Patricia
Kane-Vanni, a lawyer and Academy
volunteer.



Tillett took the Philadelphians up to a bare hilltop overlooking a rolling,
tan prairie, studded with sage and cacti that rippled away to beige and
ocher bluffs. In the distance, the Wind River
and Bear Tooth Mountains were blue, the peaks still dappled with snow.

But the paleontologists spent little time admiring the view. Their eyes were
turned to the gray shale. The bone Donawick had found belonged to a sauropod
- one of the giant, plant-eating
dinosaurs.

That was what the team was looking for and that was what it quickly found
just 18 inches below the surface. Soon, they had established an
18-by-30-foot excavation site.

The bones were plentiful and of good quality. Some bones were a mere 2
inches long, no bigger than a thread spool. Some were as big as a toddler.
The complete animal is estimated to
have been 60 feet long.

But by the end of the first week, it was becoming harder to find bones and
the team was getting restless. It was about then that Poole stumbled upon
the second dinosaur.

When it was clear the bones belonged to a theropod, Lamanna, a theropod
expert, took over the new digging site.

Lamanna, 23, does not remember the exact moment he decided to become a
paleontologist, but he is certain he was 4.

"I've just always been interested in dinosaurs, reading about them, drawing
pictures," he said. "That was my thing. That's how everyone knew me." 

Sprawled on the loose shale, Lamanna worked ever so deliberately with a
small instrument that looked like a dentist's pick in one hand and a brush
in the other.

Probe. Hit something solid. Slowly brush and pick away the soil and rock
until the bone is revealed. Probe. Pick. Brush.

"The key is not to miss the bits and pieces," said Poole, who was working
alongside Lamanna, "because if you do, your chances of putting it together
really diminish."

At the sauropod site, Kane-Vanni and Tumarkin were uncovering a set of ribs
and singing "I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No."

"We've got to bring a radio up here," Poole said.



Dinosaur hunting is an exercise in solving puzzles inside of puzzles. The
first puzzle is what is the age of the potential dinosaur site?

Across the West, the multicolored hills speak of different rock formations
and different ages. Dodson had hoped that the sauropod site was going to be
early Cretaceous, about 100
million years ago, because the big dinosaurs from that time are less well
known than those of the late Jurassic period.

But it turned out that it was Jurassic, just as Tillett had judged it. That
meant that the big dinosaur was probably an already described species.
Still, they were able to salvage more than
100 of the estimated 300 bones that made up the animal's skeleton.

The second puzzle is the hide-and-seek game of finding bones. Searching.
Probing and digging.

Finally, comes the jigsaw-puzzle game of piecing the bones together. Sitting
around Tillett's backyard picnic table one evening Poole, Lamanna and
Tumarkin tried to do just that with the
theropod.

Tillett stood over them, eyeing the pieces. "I'd bet you $5 against my
oldest boy that little sucker goes over there," he said. The two pieces fit
snugly together.

Picking up a bone, Tillett said with feigned but convincing sincerity: "You
may not realize this, but these bones make a really good soup. ... You add
some carrots and a potato, and
you've really got something."

While Tillett was offering up the recipe for dinosaur soup, Poole was
reconstructing part of the dinosaur's hand. One finger was almost 10 inches
long and ended in a nasty spike.

"Man, that looks alien," he said.



Although they were able to cull a few fossils from the excavation, most of
the theropod bones were trapped in a dense tangle. "It's almost as if the
animal collapsed in a heap," Lamanna
said.

Rather than risking opening the jumble on the hillside, a trench was dug
around the bone bed and the blocks of bone were then jacketed in burlap and
plaster and lifted out of the site.

Altogether, the team shipped an estimated 3,000 pounds of theropod and
sauropod bones back to Philadelphia and still could not get everything out
of the ground. The team members
covered the fossils they could not excavate with dirt to protect the fossils
until they can return.

"For two weeks of work, this has been very, very productive," Dodson said.
"We'll be coming back next year."

Now, Poole and Lamanna are preparing for the theropod's arrival in
Philadelphia, where the bones will become part of the Academy's collection.

"I can't wait to open it up and really see what we've got," Poole said. 

But one thing is certain - if it is a new species, it will not be called the
Urinator. "There is no way," Lamanna said, "my scientific career is going to
be associated with an animal called
the Urinator."

© 1998 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. 





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