Answers to these questions can be supplied in part because there’s a fossil record, thanks to the efforts of Winkler, Slaughter, and Ellis W. Shuler, the person for whom the museum is named.
By Laray Polk
D Magazine
In addition to Pioneer Cemetery, there’s another quiet space in Dallas that holds the bones of ancestors: the Shuler Museum of Paleontology, located on the SMU campus. The Shuler Museum has no fully assembled skeletons of prehistoric carnivores on premises or other dazzling displays (though the day I visited, there was a stack of giant turtle shells in plaster jackets in the hallway, outside the entrance). For one, the museum is a shoebox of a space located on the basement floor of the Earth Sciences building. There isn’t the room for that sort of thing. Second, the fossils here function as teaching and research collections. A casual visit from a non-expert like me requires an appointment and a great amount of patience from the host, which I received in abundance from vertebrate paleontologist and museum director Dale A. Winkler.
The museum is arranged library-style with mastodon tusks and similar large bones laid out neatly on gray industrial shelving, while smaller specimens — teeth, small bone, shell, scute, and more — are held in cabinets with pullout trays lined in soft material and organized by collection. The occasion for my visit was to view those specimens described by Bob H. Slaughter and others in the 1962 report “The Hill-Shuler Local Faunas of the Upper Trinity River, Dallas and Denton Counties, Texas.”
My questions, then as now, are basic: what kinds of animal roamed the area now known as the Great Trinity Forest? What kinds of plants and trees were present? What was the climate like? How was the Trinity River floodplain formed?
Answers to these questions can be supplied in part because there’s a fossil record, thanks to the efforts of Winkler, Slaughter, and Ellis W. Shuler, the person for whom the museum is named. Shuler was hired by SMU in 1915, the year it opened, to teach geology and related courses. He served as head of the Geology Department and Dean of Graduate Studies until his retirement, in 1953.
SMU scientists and their research have a global reach that is frequently noted, beyond peer publications and media mentions.
By Margaret Allen
SMU News & Communications
It was a good year for SMU faculty and student research efforts. Here is a small sampling of public and published acknowledgements during 2015:
Hot topic merits open access
Taylor & Francis, publisher of the online journal Environmental Education Research, lifted its subscription-only requirement to meet demand for an article on how climate change is taught to middle-schoolers in California.
Co-author of the research was Diego Román, assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.
Román’s research revealed that California textbooks are teaching sixth graders that climate change is a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions, rather than a scientific conclusion based on rigorous scientific evidence.
Research makes the cover of Biochemistry
Drugs important in the battle against cancer were tested in a virtual lab by SMU biology professors to see how they would behave in the human cell.
A computer-generated composite image of the simulation made the Dec. 15 cover of the journal Biochemistry.
Scientific articles about discoveries from the simulation were also published in the peer review journals Biochemistry and in Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.
The researchers tested the drugs by simulating their interaction in a computer-generated model of one of the cell’s key molecular pumps — the protein P-glycoprotein, or P-gp. Outcomes of interest were then tested in the Wise-Vogel wet lab.
The ongoing research is the work of biochemists John Wise, associate professor, and Pia Vogel, professor and director of the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in Dedman College. Assisting them were a team of SMU graduate and undergraduate students.
The researchers developed the model to overcome the problem of relying on traditional static images for the structure of P-gp. The simulation makes it possible for researchers to dock nearly any drug in the protein and see how it behaves, then test those of interest in an actual lab.
To date, the researchers have run millions of compounds through the pump and have discovered some that are promising for development into pharmaceutical drugs to battle cancer.
Strong interest in research on sexual victimization
Teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and after practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment, according to three professors from the SMU Department of Psychology.
The finding was reported in Behavior Therapy. The article was one of the psychology journal’s most heavily shared and mentioned articles across social media, blogs and news outlets during 2015, the publisher announced.
The study was the work of Dedman College faculty Lorelei Simpson Rowe, associate professor and Psychology Department graduate program co-director; Ernest Jouriles, professor; and Renee McDonald, SMU associate dean for research and academic affairs.
Consumers assume bigger price equals better quality
Even when competing firms can credibly disclose the positive attributes of their products to buyers, they may not do so.
Instead, they find it more lucrative to “signal” quality through the prices they charge, typically working on the assumption that shoppers think a high price indicates high quality. The resulting high prices hurt buyers, and may create a case for mandatory disclosure of quality through public policy.
That was a finding of the research of Dedman College’s Santanu Roy, professor, Department of Economics. Roy’s article about the research was published in February in one of the blue-ribbon journals, and the oldest, in the field, The Economic Journal.
Published by the U.K.’s Royal Economic Society, The Economic Journal is one of the founding journals of modern economics. The journal issued a media briefing about the paper, “Competition, Disclosure and Signaling,” typically reserved for academic papers of broad public interest.
Chemistry research group edits special issue
Chemistry professors Dieter Cremer and Elfi Kraka, who lead SMU’s Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Group, were guest editors of a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Physical Chemistry. The issue published in March.
The Computational and Theoretical research group, called CATCO for short, is a union of computational and theoretical chemistry scientists at SMU. Their focus is research in computational chemistry, educating and training graduate and undergraduate students, disseminating and explaining results of their research to the broader public, and programming computers for the calculation of molecules and molecular aggregates.
The special issue of Physical Chemistry included 40 contributions from participants of a four-day conference in Dallas in March 2014 that was hosted by CATCO. The 25th Austin Symposium drew 108 participants from 22 different countries who, combined, presented eight plenary talks, 60 lectures and about 40 posters.
CATCO presented its research with contributions from Cremer and Kraka, as well as Marek Freindorf, research assistant professor; Wenli Zou, visiting professor; Robert Kalescky, post-doctoral fellow; and graduate students Alan Humason, Thomas Sexton, Dani Setlawan and Vytor Oliveira.
There have been more than 75 graduate students and research associates working in the CATCO group, which originally was formed at the University of Cologne, Germany, before moving to SMU in 2009.
Vertebrate paleontology recognized with proclamation
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings proclaimed Oct. 11-17, 2015 Vertebrate Paleontology week in Dallas on behalf of the Dallas City Council.
The proclamation honored the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which was jointly hosted by SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College and the Perot Museum of Science and Nature. The conference drew to Dallas some 1,200 scientists from around the world.
Making research presentations or presenting research posters were: faculty members Bonnie Jacobs, Louis Jacobs, Michael Polcyn, Neil Tabor and Dale Winkler; adjunct research assistant professor Alisa Winkler; research staff member Kurt Ferguson; post-doctoral researchers T. Scott Myers and Lauren Michael; and graduate students Matthew Clemens, John Graf, Gary Johnson and Kate Andrzejewski.
The host committee co-chairs were Anthony Fiorillo, adjunct research professor; and Louis Jacobs, professor. Committee members included Polcyn; Christopher Strganac, graduate student; Diana Vineyard, research associate; and research professor Dale Winkler.
KERA radio reporter Kat Chow filed a report from the conference, explaining to listeners the science of vertebrate paleontology, which exposes the past, present and future of life on earth by studying fossils of animals that had backbones.
SMU earthquake scientists rock scientific journal
Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)
Findings by the SMU earthquake team reverberated across the nation with publication of their scientific article in the prestigious British interdisciplinary journal Nature, ranked as one of the world’s most cited scientific journals.
The article reported that the SMU-led seismology team found that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of unusually frequent earthquakes occurring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near the small community of Azle.
The research was the work of Dedman College faculty Matthew Hornbach, associate professor of geophysics; Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics; Brian Stump, SMU Albritton Chair in Earth Sciences; Chris Hayward, research staff and director geophysics research program; and Beatrice Magnani, associate professor of geophysics.
The article, “Causal factors for seismicity near Azle, Texas,” published online in late April. Already the article has been downloaded nearly 6,000 times, and heavily shared on both social and conventional media. The article has achieved a ranking of 270, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 144,972 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and 98th percentile of 626 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.
“It has a very high impact factor for an article of its age,” said Robert Gregory, professor and chair, SMU Earth Sciences Department.
The scientific article also was entered into the record for public hearings both at the Texas Railroad Commission and the Texas House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity.
Researchers settle long-debated heritage question of “The Ancient One”
The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)
The research of Dedman College anthropologist and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory David Meltzer played a role in settling the long-debated and highly controversial heritage of “Kennewick Man.”
Also known as “The Ancient One,” the 8,400-year-old male skeleton discovered in Washington state has been the subject of debate for nearly two decades. Argument over his ancestry has gained him notoriety in high-profile newspaper and magazine articles, as well as making him the subject of intense scholarly study.
Officially the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 and radiocarbon dated to 8500 years ago.
Because of his cranial shape and size he was declared not Native American but instead ‘Caucasoid,’ implying a very different population had once been in the Americas, one that was unrelated to contemporary Native Americans.
But Native Americans long have claimed Kennewick Man as theirs and had asked for repatriation of his remains for burial according to their customs.
Meltzer, collaborating with his geneticist colleague Eske Willerslev and his team at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, in June reported the results of their analysis of the DNA of Kennewick in the prestigious British journal Nature in the scientific paper “The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man.”
The results were announced at a news conference, settling the question based on first-ever DNA evidence: Kennewick Man is Native American.
The announcement garnered national and international media attention, and propelled a new push to return the skeleton to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Bring the Ancient One Home Act of 2015 and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has offered state assistance for returning the remains to Native Tribes.
Science named the Kennewick work one of its nine runners-up in the highly esteemed magazine’s annual “Breakthrough of the Year” competition.
The research article has been viewed more than 60,000 times. It has achieved a ranking of 665, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 169,466 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and in the 94th percentile of 958 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.
In “Kennewick Man: coming to closure,” an article in the December issue of Antiquity, a journal of Cambridge University Press, Meltzer noted that the DNA merely confirmed what the tribes had known all along: “We are him, he is us,” said one tribal spokesman. Meltzer concludes: “We presented the DNA evidence. The tribal members gave it meaning.”
Prehistoric vacuum cleaner captures singular award
Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)
Science writer Laura Geggel with Live Science named a new species of extinct marine mammal identified by two SMU paleontologists among “The 10 Strangest Animal Discoveries of 2015.”
The new species, dubbed a prehistoric hoover by London’s Daily Mail online news site, was identified by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and paleontologist and SMU adjunct research professor Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.
Jacobs and Fiorillo co-authored a study about the identification of new fossils from the oddball creature Desmostylia, discovered in the same waters where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed. The hippo-like creature ate like a vacuum cleaner and is a new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years.
Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago. Their strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said.
As noted by the CERN Courier — the news magazine of the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest science experiment — more than 250 scientists from 30 countries presented more than 200 talks on a multitude of subjects relevant to experimental and theoretical research. SMU physicists presented at the conference.
The SMU organizing committee was led by Fred Olness, professor and chair of the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, who also gave opening and closing remarks at the conference. The committee consisted of other SMU faculty, including Jodi Cooley, associate professor; Simon Dalley, senior lecturer; Robert Kehoe, professor; Pavel Nadolsky, associate professor, who also presented progress on experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; Randy Scalise, senior lecturer; and Stephen Sekula, associate professor.
Sekula also organized a series of short talks for the public about physics and the big questions that face us as we try to understand our universe.
The folks at SMU say a find like this is extremely rare, and for a five-year-old kid to have found it, may be more rare than the Dino itself.
The fossil bones of a 100 million-year-old dinosaur discovered at a shopping center construction site will be studied and identified by paleontologists at Southern Methodist University’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.
The bones were discovered by a Dallas Zoo employee and his young son. The fossils have been transported to SMU’s Shuler research museum in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.
The discovery of the bones, believed to be from the family of armored dinosaurs called nodasuaridae, was covered by local TV stations NBC Channel 5, CBS Channel 11 and Channel CW 33.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dale Winkler in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
To book a live or taped interview with Michael Polcyn in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
By NewsFix
Channel CW 33
Dinosaurs come in all shapes and sizes. Well, it also turns out so do Dino-diggers.
“Over the past few years, we’ve found a lot of really amazing things, but this is by far the most awesome thing we’ve found.”
Yeah, Dallas zoo keeper Tim Brys and his son Wiley hit the Jurassic jackpot while digging around a Mansfield shopping center development.
Wiley, who is just five-years-old, found something 100 million years in the making.
“He walked up here a head of me here and came back with a piece of bone. It was a pretty good size. I knew it was something interesting,” Brys said.
That interesting thing is what SMU paleontologists call a Nodosaur, a dinosaur probably as large as a horse, covered in armored plates.
Now this guy is headed to SMU to be examined.
“I don’t think it has hit either one of us just how amazing this is. I know it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity a lot of people never find something like this.” Brys said.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
The SMU scientists started excavating the dinosaur bones on Friday. They speculate the bones belong to a group of dinosaurs called Nodosaurs — herbivorous creatures that lived in the late Jurassic to early Cretaceous periods.
The fossil bones of a 100 million-year-old dinosaur discovered at a shopping center construction site will be studied and identified by paleontologists at Southern Methodist University’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.
The bones were discovered by a Dallas Zoo employee and his young son. The fossils have been transported to SMU’s Shuler research museum in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.
The discovery of the bones, believed to be from the family of armored dinosaurs called nodasuaridae, was covered by journalist Dominique Mosbergen, reporting for The Huffington Post.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dale Winkler in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
To book a live or taped interview with Michael Polcyn in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
By Dominique Mosbergen
The Huffington Post
A 4-year-old and his dad were looking for fossils in Mansfield, Texas, when the boy made an incredible discovery. There, buried in the dirt, the child reportedly found rare, 100-million-year-old dinosaur bones.
Last September, Tim Brys, a keeper at the Dallas Zoo, brought his son, Wiley, to the site of a future shopping center to conduct a fossil hunt, NBC News reported. The earth had been dug up to make way for the development, and Brys said he had hoped to find some fish fossils buried there.
“We commonly go collect fossils as something we can do together to be outside. Wiley enjoys coming with me on my trips,” Brys told the news outlet.
That day, the father and son reportedly did find some fish vertebrae at the site. But Wiley went on to make a far more astonishing discovery.
[Wiley] walked up ahead of me and found a piece of bone,” Brys told the Dallas Morning News. “It was a pretty good size and I knew I had something interesting.”
He was right.
According to scientists at Southern Methodist University, Wiley had stumbled upon some rare dinosaur bones, estimated to date back 100 million years.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Nodosaurs are plant eating animals that are built a little like tanks with a relatively broad body with armor in their skin.
The fossil bones of a 100 million-year-old dinosaur discovered at a shopping center construction site will be studied and identified by paleontologists at Southern Methodist University’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.
The bones were discovered by a Dallas Zoo employee and his young son. The fossils have been transported to SMU’s Shuler research museum in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.
The discovery of the bones, believed to be from the family of armored dinosaurs called nodasuaridae, was covered by science journalist Lauren Silverman, reporting for KERA public radio.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dale Winkler in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
To book a live or taped interview with Michael Polcyn in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
By Lauren Silverman
KERA Public Radio
A Dallas Zookeeper went on a fossil hunt with his little boy at a construction site. And the 4-year-old picked up what turned out to be a dinosaur bone – likely 100 million years old. On Wednesday, scientists found another key bone.
Wiley Brys and his dad Tim were digging through the dirt, just looking for some shark teeth last August when it happened.
“My son walked ahead of me and walked back with a chunk of bone that looked like rib bone,” Brys says.
Wylie Brys, now 5-years-old, discovered a bone in a construction site behind a Mansfield shopping center.
Wylie Brys, now 5-years-old, discovered a bone in a construction site behind a Mansfield shopping center.
A few inches long, it was a bit moist and a purplish gray. The bone, experts say, is likely 100-million years old.
For a kid who still counts half birthdays, that many years is hard to imagine.
“I don’t think he completely understands what’s going on,” Brys, a zookeeper who works with reptiles at the Dallas Zoo, says. “He’s just as interested in as playing in the dirt as the fossils I think.”
What Brys and his kid uncovered behind a Mansfield shopping center is thought to be part of a group of dinosaurs called Nodosaurs. They’re plant eating animals that are built a little like tanks.
“They’re these little armored, squatty-looking animals, relatively broad body with armor in their skin,” says Mike Polcyn, director of SMU’s Digital Earth Sciences Lab.
Polcyn has been working at the dig site, preparing the bones to be moved. Just when the team thought they’d uncovered it all, Polcyn says, they unearthed the Nodosaur’s upper leg bone.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Ancient whale swam hundreds of miles up African river and left behind clues about geology and climate change
Paleontologist James G. Mead excavating a whale specimen in an open-pit mine in Kenya in 1964. The long-lost specimen has helped date the onset of uplift on the East African Plateau, a change that altered the local environment and shaped the evolution of human ancestors. (Courtesy of James G. Mead)
Findings of the research provide the first constraint on the start of uplift of East African terrain from near sea level.
Uplift associated with the Great Rift Valley of East Africa and the environmental changes it produced have puzzled scientists for decades because the timing and starting elevation have been poorly identified.
Jacobs and his colleagues tapped a fossil from the most precisely dated beaked whale in the world — and the only stranded whale ever found so far inland on the African continent — to pinpoint for the first time a date when East Africa’s mysterious elevation began.
The 17 million-year-old fossil is from the beaked Ziphiidae whale family. It was discovered 740 kilometers inland at a elevation of 620 meters in modern Kenya’s harsh desert region.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
By Geoffrey Mohan
Los Angeles Times
A 22-foot beaked whale that apparently took a wrong turn up an African river about 17 million years ago may offer clues to the climate-change forces that shaped human evolution.
Lost for more than 30 years, the fossilized beak with part of the jaw bone helps determine that the East African Plateau probably began rising no earlier than 17 million years ago, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That geologic upheaval in an area known as the cradle of humankind is believed to be responsible for the gradual conversion of dense, humid forests into more sparsely treed grasslands that made upright locomotion on two feet advantageous to evolving human ancestors.
“The whale is telling us all kinds of things,” said study coauthor Louis Jacobs, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “It tells us the starting point for all that uplift that changed the climate that led to humans. It’s amazing.”
Jacobs had been searching for the specimen since 1980, when he was head of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya. He had read about the 1964 find, by James G. Mead of the Smithsonian Institution, in a 1975 research paper.
Every time Jacobs visited Harvard, Washington or Nairobi, he would try to find it.
“It was protected by a plaster jacket, so you couldn’t really see it,” he said. “I suspect nobody knew what it was. It was just kept in the collections there.”
Finally, just before another trip to Kenya in 2011, a collections official at Harvard located the fossil, sheathed in the protective jacket, Jacobs said.
Jacobs had the specimen scanned and analyzed, then contacted Henry Wichura, a structural geologist at the University of Potsdam in Germany, who had been studying plateau region, trying to determine when it started rising. He had found evidence that rivers and lava had flowed east from high points on the plateau at least 13 million years ago.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Findings of the research provide the first constraint on the start of uplift of East African terrain from near sea level.
Uplift associated with the Great Rift Valley of East Africa and the environmental changes it produced have puzzled scientists for decades because the timing and starting elevation have been poorly identified.
Jacobs and his colleagues tapped a fossil from the most precisely dated beaked whale in the world — and the only stranded whale ever found so far inland on the African continent — to pinpoint for the first time a date when East Africa’s mysterious elevation began.
The 17 million-year-old fossil is from the beaked Ziphiidae whale family. It was discovered 740 kilometers inland at a elevation of 620 meters in modern Kenya’s harsh desert region.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
By Richard Gray Daily Mail A whale that swam hundreds of miles up an African river after taking a wrong turn 17 million years ago is helping shed light on a key moment in human evolution.
Palaeontologists discovered the fossilised remains of the ancient ancestor to modern beaked whales in the middle of one of the harshest desert areas of Turkana, Kenya.
It has allowed scientists to pinpoint when the landscape in east Africa began to change as the land around the Great Rift Valley began to rise up.
This was a crucial moment in human evolution from primates as it created the dry open habitats that led our ape-like ancestors to walk upright for the first time.
They say that for the whale to have travelled so far inland in a river the area must have been much wetter, far flatter and dominated by forests.
Professor Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate palaeontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who led the study, said: ‘The whale was stranded up river at a time when east Africa was at sea level and was covered with forest and jungle.
‘As that part of the continent rose up, that caused the climate to become drier and drier. So over millions of years, forest gave way to grasslands.
‘Primates evolved to adapt to grasslands and dry country. And that’s when – in human evolution – the primates started to walk upright.’
The whale fossil was first discovered in Loperot, west Turkana, Kenya in 1964 by palaeontologist James Mead, a curator at the Smithsonian Instution at the time.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Uplift and aridification of East Africa causing changes in vegetation has been considered a driver of human evolution. Now a fossil whale stranded far inland in Kenya marks the first time scientists can pinpoint how many millions of years ago the uplift began.
Uplift associated with the Great Rift Valley of East Africa and the environmental changes it produced have puzzled scientists for decades. Timing and starting elevation have been poorly understood.
Now paleontologists have tapped a fossil from the most precisely dated beaked whale in the world to pinpoint for the first time a date when East Africa’s mysterious elevation began. The stranded whale is the only one ever found so far inland on the African continent.
The 17 million-year-old fossil is from the beaked Ziphiidae whale family. It was discovered 740 kilometers inland at a elevation of 620 meters in modern Kenya’s harsh desert region, said vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
At the time the whale was alive, it would have been swimming far inland up a river with a low gradient ranging from 24 to 37 meters over more than 600 to 900 kilometers, said Jacobs, a co-author of the study.
A map of Africa and Kenya showing where a 17-million-year-old whale fossil was found far inland . (Wichura/PNAS)
“The whale was stranded up river at a time when east Africa was at sea level and was covered with forest and jungle,” Jacobs said. “As that part of the continent rose up, that caused the climate to become drier and drier. So over millions of years, forest gave way to grasslands. Primates evolved to adapt to grasslands and dry country. And that’s when — in human evolution — the primates started to walk upright.”
Identified as a Turkana ziphiid, the whale would have lived in the open ocean, like its modern beaked cousins. Ziphiids, still one of the ocean’s top predators, are the deepest diving air-breathing mammals alive, plunging to nearly 10,000 feet to feed, primarily on squid.
The whale fossil bones were originally thought to be those of a turtle specimen, as was recorded in the fossil catalogue for the Harvard Loperot Expedition in 1964. (Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.)
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The ancient large Anza River flowed in a southeastward direction to the Indian Ocean.
The whale, probably disoriented, swam into the river and could not change its course, continuing well inland.
“You don’t usually find whales so far inland,” Jacobs said. “Many of the known beaked whale fossils are dredged by fishermen from the bottom of the sea.”
Determining ancient land elevation is very difficult, but the whale provides one near sea level.
“It’s rare to get a paleo-elevation,” Jacobs said, noting only one other in East Africa, determined from a lava flow.
Beaked whale fossil surfaced after going missing for more than 30 years
The beaked whale fossil was discovered in 1964 by J.G. Mead in what is now the Turkana region of northwest Kenya.
Mead, an undergraduate student at Yale University at the time, made a career at the Smithsonian Institution, from which he recently retired. Over the years, the Kenya whale fossil went missing in storage. Jacobs, who was at one time head of the Division of Paleontology for the National Museums of Kenya, spent 30 years trying to locate the fossil. His effort paid off in 2011, when he rediscovered it at Harvard University and returned it to the National Museums of Kenya.
The fossil is only a small portion of the whale, which Mead originally estimated was 7 meters long during its life. Mead unearthed the beak portion of the skull, 2.6 feet long and 1.8 feet wide, specifically the maxillae and premaxillae, the bones that form the upper jaw and palate.
Modern cases of stranded whales have been recorded in the Thames River in London, swimming up a gradient of 2 meters over 70 kilometers; the Columbia River in Washington state, a gradient of 6 meters over 161 kilometers; the Sacramento River in California, a gradient of 4 meters over 133 kilometers; and the Amazon River in Brazil, a gradient of 1 meter over 1,000 kilometers.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
From dinosaurs to sea turtles, and from technical assistance to advisory roles, SMU faculty and students, the SMU Shuler Museum, and the SMU Innovation Gymnasium have teamed with the nation’s new premier museum of nature and science in Dallas
Fossils on loan by SMU to the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science include those of animals from an ancient sea that once covered Dallas.
The fossils represent a slice of SMU’s scientific collaboration with the Perot Museum and its predecessor, the Dallas Museum of Natural History.
Items from SMU’s scientists include a 35-foot skeletal cast of the African dinosaur Malawisaurus standing sentry in the spacious glass lobby of the Perot, which opened Dec. 1 near downtown Dallas.
“The new museum building itself is an icon, but it’s also a statement by the city about taking the advances of science to the public,” said vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, an SMU Earth Sciences professor, who serves on the Perot Museum’s Advisory Board and Collections Committee.
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Jacobs, who was ad interim director of the Dallas Museum of Natural History in 1999, led the team that discovered Malawisaurus in Africa. He provided the cast to the museum.
A 35-foot skeletal cast of the African dinosaur Malawisaurus, discovered by a team led by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, is on display at the Perot Museum. (Image: Rich Tate, Alford Media)
“Here at SMU we train students and create new knowledge. The museum’s mission is to take the stories of science out to the general public so they can be used,” said Jacobs. “Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum Curator of Earth Sciences, is a world-class scientist with whom we work. We have a junction between the mission, training and knowledge we have here, infused into and enhanced by what the museum does. That’s why the museum is important to SMU and that’s why SMU is important to the museum.”
Also on exhibit from SMU is a miniature unmanned autonomous helicopter designed for fighting fires that was built by SMU engineering students.
Herbivorous dinosaur is exhibited with ancient Texas plant fossils Shuler Museum fossils can be viewed in the T. Boone Pickens Life Then and Now Hall. They include an unnamed 113 million-year-old herbivorous dinosaur discovered in 1985 at Proctor Lake southwest of Stephenville, Texas.
For perspective on that exhibit’s paleoenvironment in Texas at the time, SMU paleobotanist Bonnie F. Jacobs provided fossil wood, fossil cones, fossil leaves and images of microscopic pollen grains from the Shuler Museum. The fossils provided information used to create a model of an extinct tree to accompany the exhibit.
Fossil cones and leaves discovered in Hood County are from an extinct ancient tree, says SMU paleobotanist Bonnie F. Jacobs. (Image: SMU)
Plant fossils inform scientists of the ecological setting in which dinosaurs lived and died, said Bonnie Jacobs, an SMU associate professor in the Huffington Department. Her collaboration with the Perot’s Fiorillo, who also is an adjunct research professor of paleoecology in the SMU Earth sciences department, includes fossil plants from Alaska.
“Understanding past climate and climate change will help us understand what may happen in the future,” she said. Bonnie Jacobs is featured in a Perot Museum Career Inspirations video that is part of the permanent exhibit and also advised on the text of some exhibits.
“The world of the past is a test case for global climate models, which are computer driven,” she said. “If we can reconstruct climates of the ancient Earth accurately, then we can create better models of what may happen in the future.”
Understanding paleoclimate through fossil soils is the expertise of Neil Tabor, an SMU associate professor in the Earth Sciences Department whose Perot Museum video discusses ancient soils, environments and the biggest extinction event in Earth’s history.
Fossils date from period when D/FW was covered by ancient sea The plant fossils are from the geologic period called the Cretaceous, from 146 million years ago to 66 million years ago. They were discovered at the prolific Jones Ranch fossil beds southwest of Fort Worth in Hood County.
At that time, the Jones Ranch — famous as the discovery site of Paluxysaurus jonesi, the state dinosaur of Texas — was not far inland from the muddy coastal shore of a vast shallow sea that a dozen years later would divide North America.
Giant fossil sea turtles were discovered in northeast Texas in 2006 by a 5-year-old girl, Preston Smith. SMU paleontologist Diana Vineyard identified the giant turtles as Toxochelys. (Image: SMU)
Other SMU fossils on loan also date from that period. They include sea turtles, as well as mosasaurs, which were ancient sea lizards that evolved flippers and streamlined bodies for life in the sea.
Stunning examples of fossil sea turtles were discovered in 2006 by a 5 year-old girl, Preston Smith, during a family outing along the North Sulphur River near Ladonia in northeast Texas. The turtles were stacked one on top of the other as if caught in sudden death 80 million years ago.
Diana Vineyard, director of administration and research associate at SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, identified the turtles as Toxochelys while an SMU graduate student.
Also on loan from the Shuler Museum, and also identified by Vineyard, are 110-million-year-old sea turtles from the Early Cretaceous of Texas, discovered near Granbury. They represent early specimens in the transition of turtles from land and shallow marine animals to fully developed sea turtles, Vineyard said.
Exhibit includes mosasaur named for the city of Dallas
A Perot Museum exhibit includes a giant fossil sea turtle discovered in northeast Texas in 2006 by a 5-year-old girl. SMU paleontologist Diana Vineyard identified the giant turtles as Toxochelys. (Image: SMU)
Michael Polcyn, director of SMU’s Digital Earth Sciences Laboratory, put his expertise to work providing technical assistance for the museum’s Ocean Dallas marine reptile exhibit.
An expert in mosasaurs, Polcyn created digital reconstructions of Dallasaurus, named for the city of Dallas, and physically reconstructed the skeletons of Dallasaurus and another mosasaur, Tethysaurus, for the exhibit.
“The Ocean Dallas exhibit was a great opportunity to showcase the extraordinary story that the rocks in the Dallas area tell us about life in the deep past,” said Polcyn, whose mosasaur fieldwork extends from the United States to Angola.
“It was a great experience working with the museum’s creative and technical professionals on this project,” Polcyn said, “but it should be mentioned that many of the fossils in the exhibit were found by interested citizens walking the local creeks and rivers in search of these beasts, and it is they who deserve tremendous credit for bringing these finds to the public.”
Polcyn, who also is featured in a Perot Museum Career Inspirations video, created a skull reconstruction of the Perot Museum’s duck-billed dinosaur Protohadros, named by former SMU doctoral student Jason Head.
Other SMU fossils include dino footprint, croc egg and giant ammonite
The ammonite Parapuzosia, more than 3 feet in diameter and discovered in Dallas County, is on loan from SMU’s Shuler Museum to the Perot Museum.
SMU vertebrate paleontologist Dale A. Winkler, SMU research professor and director of the Shuler Museum, said other fossils on loan include:
a rare 110 million-year-old crocodile egg discovered with specimens of the crocodile Pachycheilosuchus trinquei west of Glen Rose. Pachycheilosuchus trinquei was named by Jack Rogers, a former SMU student. Rogers also found and identified the egg.
an ammonite, Parapuzosia, more than 3 feet in diameter and discovered in Dallas County.
In 2006, two SMU doctoral students assisted with excavation of the new species of dinosaur named for the museum’s namesakes, Margot and Ross Perot.
The dinosaur, Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, was discovered by the Perot Museum’s Fiorillo and prepared by Perot Museum researcher Ronald Tykoski.
Using portable 3D laser technology, SMU scientists preserved electronically a rare 110 million-year-old fossilized dinosaur footprint from ichnospecies Eubrontes glenrosensis. The model is on display in the Perot Museum. (Image: SMU)
SMU doctoral student Christopher Strganac and former SMU doctoral student Thomas L. Adams helped dig Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum in Alaska. The only skeletal mount of its kind in the world, the 69 million-year-old skull is on display in the Life Then and Now Hall of the Perot Museum.
Also on view in the museum is a 3D cast of a dinosaur footprint that Adams and Strganac created from the laser scan of a 110 million-year-old fossilized dinosaur footprint, from ichnospecies Eubrontes glenrosensis, that was previously excavated and built into the wall of a bandstand at a Texas courthouse in the 1930s.
Another former SMU doctoral student highlighted among the exhibits is Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, who describes in a video the mentoring he received from the Perot’s Fiorillo while the two worked together in Alaska’s Denali National Park.
SMU’s Shuler Museum is named for Ellis W. Shuler, founder of the University’s geology department. Shuler was a driving force behind the precursor to the Perot Museum, the Dallas Museum of Natural History, established in 1936, said geologist James E. Brooks, SMU professor emeritus and SMU Provost emeritus. Brooks served on the Dallas Museum of Natural History’s board of directors from the 1980s until 2005.
Perot Museum presents a strong scientific face of Dallas “Any first-rate city needs a strong public scientific face with which it’s identified,” Brooks said. “The Perot Museum is going to be that organization.”
Brooks was instrumental in the negotiations with Egypt that enabled the Dallas Museum of Natural History to bring Ramses the Great, its first major exhibit, to Dallas in 1989.
“Museums, in addition to educating children and the general public, also have the responsibility to generate new knowledge, because that makes the city a more intellectually vibrant place,” he said.
Brooks and Louis Jacobs serve on the Perot Museum’s Collections Committee, which serves in an advisory role to Perot Earth Sciences Curator Fiorillo. He and other SMU faculty and staff collaborate on field expeditions to Alaska and Mongolia.
SMU’s Innovation Gymasium contributes to Perot exhibit
Pegasus, an unmanned autonomous helicopter that can fight fires, was designed and built by Lyle Engineering students under Innovation Gymnasium Director Nathan Huntoon. (Image: SMU)
SMU’s Innovation Gymnasium is featured in an exhibit in the Texas Instruments Engineering and Innovation Hall at the Perot Museum, said Nathan R. Huntoon, director of the Innovation Gymnasium at the SMU Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering.
Central to the Engineering and Innovation Hall exhibit is an unmanned autonomous helicopter that can fight fires, built by SMU engineering students.
The Innovation Gym enables SMU students to hone their engineering and creative skills by working on real world, design challenges. Companies, researchers and non-profits all provide real challenges for the students to develop innovative solutions, often under intense time and financial pressure.
The firefighting helicopter featured in the new museum was the first such project.
Accompanying the helicopter is a video demonstration of the helicopter fighting simulated fires, as well as a touch-screen application with interviews of Huntoon and SMU students discussing engineering and innovation.
Huntoon has been a member of the Technology Committee and the Engineering and Innovation Committee for the Perot Museum.
James Quick, a professor of Earth sciences, as well as SMU’s associate vice president for research and dean of graduate studies, applauded the establishment of the Perot Museum, the result of decades of work by many people.
“Every great urban center should have an outstanding museum of nature and science to stimulate the imaginations of people of all ages and attract them to science,” Quick said. “The contribution the Perot Museum will make to North Texas cannot be overstated.” — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
To book a live or taped interview with Thomas Adams in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Dallas Morning News reporter Marc Ramirez has written about the big prehistoric crocodile identified by SMU paleontologist Thomas L. Adams, a doctoral candidate in Dedman College’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.
Making its first appearance in Texas, the genus known as Terminonaris was thought to have originated in Europe, but Adams’ research indicates it now appears to have been a native of the Lone Star State.
The switch in origins for Terminonaris is based on the identification of a well-preserved, narrow fossil snout that was discovered along the shoreline of Lake Lewisville near Dallas.
The 96-million-year-old fossil from Texas is the oldest prehistoric crocodile of its kind in the world, says Adams. A distant cousin of modern crocodiles and alligators, Terminonaris was similar to the modern-day Indian gharial, only much larger.
By MARC RAMIREZ
Dallas Morning News
Thanks to a mail carrier’s discovery, it now appears the Beast from the East was actually a Guest from the West.
About five years ago, Brian Condon got tired of being cooped up at his Lakewood Village home and figured he’d go out and find a fossil.
What he found that day at Lewisville Lake would ultimately brand a supposedly European-based prehistoric crocodile as a native Texan instead.
Meet Terminonaris — a 25-foot-long reptile predating the Lone Star State by about 96 million years.
SMU paleontologist Thomas Adams was among the team that identified the creature. The team’s findings were published in May???s issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The animal is a cousin to today’s crocodiles and alligators, the largest of which is the saltwater crocodile, which can reach 20 feet in length.
Previously, most of the few known Terminonaris specimens were from North America. The oldest known, however, was linked to a single 94 million-year-old jawbone found in Germany, leading scientists to surmise that the animal had originated in Europe and found its way westward.
That theory has probably been upended, with the Texan croc apparently outdating its German counterpart by about 2 million years.
“We have to really rethink: Did this group really originate in Europe and disperse west?” said Adams, who now has the fossilized snout stored in his office. “Or is it more likely that it originated in Texas?”
The discovery of a local Terminonaris now indicates the animals originated in what is now the southern U.S., then spread north along the shallow Western Interior Seaway, which stretched from what is now the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.
Condon, the amateur collector, was used to finding ammonites and shark teeth near the end of the peninsula dividing the two northern forks of Lewisville Lake. Ten years earlier, he’d found most of a plesiosaur.
To book a live or taped interview with Thomas Adams in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
London Daily Mail reporter Mark Duell has written about the big prehistoric crocodile identified by SMU paleontologist Thomas L. Adams, a doctoral candidate in Dedman College’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.
Making its first appearance in Texas, the genus known as Terminonaris was thought to have originated in Europe, but Adams’ research indicates it now appears to have been a native of the Lone Star State.
The switch in origins for Terminonaris is based on the identification of a well-preserved, narrow fossil snout that was discovered along the shoreline of Lake Lewisville near Dallas.
The 96-million-year-old fossil from Texas is the oldest prehistoric crocodile of its kind in the world, says Adams. A distant cousin of modern crocodiles and alligators, Terminonaris was similar to the modern-day Indian gharial, only much larger.
Mark Duell
London Daily Mail
He measured 25ft, weighed more than a ton and lived almost 100 million years ago.
A palaeontologist has identified the oldest prehistoric crocodile of its kind in the world after the fossil of a Terminonaris was found at Lake Lewisville near Dallas, Texas.
The realisation by Thomas L. Adams has also changed what we know about the species originally thought to have originated in Europe, because it now appears it was a native of Texas.
Mr Adams, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, identified the reptile from its long snout which is more than 2ft long and 7in wide, reported Physorg.com.
It was discovered by Dallas amateur fossil enthusiast Brian Condon, who found the heavy pieces of the snout and a vertebrate in 2005 while fossil hunting, and donated them to the university.
Mr Condon had originally thought the pieces were petrified wood.
‘This piece looked like a loaf of bread from Subway,’ he said. ‘It was all wrinkled. Then I picked it up and turned it over and saw it had big round conical teeth. I thought: “This is amazing. It’s a jaw.'”
The discovery of the 96-million-year-old reptile’s fossil suggested that its head would have been about one metre long, Mr Adams said.
The Terminonaris is a cousin of the modern-day Indian gharial but was much larger — and it is a distant cousin of modern-day crocodiles and alligators, reported Southern Methodist University.
Mr Adams revealed the find ‘changes a lot about what we thought we knew about this group.’
‘Now we know the group had a wider distribution range, and that it’s much older,’ he said. ‘It represents a unique find for Texas. This is the first occurrence of Terminonaris in Texas.
‘It’s also the oldest occurrence of Terminonaris in the world and it’s also the southernmost occurrence of Terminonaris anywhere.’
Rare find alters origins and distribution of Terminonaris; first home was Texas and North America — not Europe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHS6vE4o3XY
Making its first appearance in Texas, a prehistoric crocodile thought to have originated in Europe now appears to have been a native of the Lone Star State.
The switch in origins for the genus known as Terminonaris is based on the identification of a well-preserved, narrow fossil snout that was discovered along the shoreline of a lake near Dallas.
The 96-million-year-old fossil from Texas is the oldest prehistoric crocodile of its kind in the world, according to paleontologist Thomas L. Adams at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who identified the reptile.
A distant cousin of modern crocodiles and alligators, Terminonaris was similar to the modern-day Indian gharial, only much larger.
“With the recognition of Terminonaris here in Texas, this actually changes a lot about what we thought we knew about this group,” Adams said.
“Now we know the group had a wider distribution range, and that it’s much older. It represents a unique find for Texas. This is the first occurrence of Terminonaris in Texas. It’s also the oldest occurrence of Terminonaris in the world, and it’s also the southernmost occurrence of Terminonaris anywhere.”
There are six other known Terminonaris fossil specimens: five from North America and one from Europe. The European specimen, from Germany, previously was thought to be the oldest. Scientists had concluded that Terminonaris originated in Europe and then traversed the Atlantic and dispersed throughout North America.
Big Texas crocodile swam the shores of North America’s prehistoric seaway Adams identified the reptile primarily from its long snout, which measures more than 2 feet long and 7 inches wide, or 62 centimeters. With a snout that long, Adams estimates the head would have been about one meter long.
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“Based on Nile crocodiles and the Indian gharial, which are both large crocodiles, a regression analysis indicates this Terminonaris probably would have been 23 to 25 feet long,” said Adams. “The largest living crocodile today is the saltwater crocodile, which can reach up to 20 feet in length.”
The Texas Terminonaris was an adult and most likely weighed more than a ton, he said.
Adams identified the fossils in “First Occurrence of the Long-Snouted Crocodyliform Terminonaris (Pholidosauridae) from the Woodbine Formation (Cenomanian) of Texas” in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Prehistoric crocodiles such as Terminonaris together with living crocodiles make up a large group called crocodyliformes. While technically there are differences between living crocodiles and each of the different types of fossil crocodile forms, all of them are often commonly referred to as crocodiles.
Today there are only 23 species of living crocodiles, a small number compared to the many species of mammals, birds, lizards, snakes and fish alive today, Adams said. That’s in stark contrast to prehistoric times.
“In the past, the crocodilian forms were very diverse and they were very successful. There were hundreds of species. Even at the time of the Texas Terminonaris, they were found everywhere,” Adams said.
Texas specimen fills gap, expands age and range of group Texas Terminonaris was discovered by Dallas-area amateur fossil enthusiast Brian Condon, a rural mail carrier. Condon discovered the heavy pieces of the snout and a vertebrate in 2005 while fossil hunting near his home on Lake Lewisville, a 26,000-acre recreational and fishing lake managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He spotted the first of the pieces along the shoreline. Condon donated the fossils to SMU’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.
In prehistoric times, Texas Terminonaris would have made its home in a marine setting, along the eastern shore of North America’s vast prehistoric Western Interior Seaway. One hundred million years ago the seaway was a wide, shallow sea that split the North American continent in half from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, said Adams, lead author on the scientific article. The seaway would have covered Lake Lewisville’s location.
In its day-to-day life on the seaway, Terminonaris would have kept close to shore, perhaps in a shallow lagoon or estuary, also venturing into the seaway’s warm salty water to hunt for fish. Like modern crocodiles and alligators, Terminonaris would have eaten whatever it could catch, Adams said. Its long, slender snout was well-suited for devouring fish, small mammals and even small dinosaurs.
North America’s other Terminonaris fossil specimens also were found along the seaway. A Kansas specimen is the youngest, about 91 million years, while those from Saskatchewan, Canada, and Montana are 93 million years old. The German specimen is 94 million years old.
“Terminonaris now here in Texas fills in a gap that we didn’t have information for,” Adams said. “It tells us that as a group, as a genus, they were around much longer, because we extend the age back to 96 million years. The range for them is now expanded, because this is the most southern occurrence of them.”
Well-preserved fossil offers no clues to adult reptile’s cause of death While the Texas fossil is well-preserved, how the reptile died remains a mystery since only the snout was found.
It probably died in the water or washed out into the open sea, where it floated to the bottom and was buried very quickly, said Adams. The discovery of seven Terminonaris fossil specimens worldwide is significant, he said.
“To be fossilized, it requires they die at the right time in the right place, be buried very quickly, then eventually be exposed and uncovered,” he said. “So the odds of being fossilized and being found as a fossil are very slim.”
Condon found one piece at the water’s edge of Lake Lewisville. The other pieces were further up a bank that sloped toward the shore, Condon said. The pieces had been deposited on the ground by receding water, pulled from the Woodbine Formation by constant waves that had washed away a soil bank and uncovered the heavy fossils. The outcrop of the Woodbine Formation visible at Lake Lewisville starts at the Red River in North Texas and thins as it nears Dallas.
Condon, who had previously found other fossils in the area, initially thought the pieces were petrified wood.
“This piece looked like a loaf of bread from Subway. It was all wrinkled,” Condon said. “Then I picked it up and turned it over and saw it had teeth — big, round conical teeth — and I thought, ‘This is amazing. It’s a jaw.'”
The research was funded by Southern Methodist University???s Institute for the Study of Earth & Man. — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
WFAA-TV reporter Jonathan Betz has covered the flying reptile research of SMU paleontologist Timothy S. Myers and the rare discovery of the bones by amateur fossil hunter Gary Byrd. The story, North Texan finds dinosaurs in our backyards, aired March 17.
Myers identified fossilized bones discovered in Texas from a flying reptile that died 89 million years ago. The bones may be the world’s earliest occurrence of the prehistoric creature known as Pteranodon, Myers says.
Pteranodon was a type of pterosaur that lived about the same time as some dinosaurs, about 100 million to 65 million years ago. The only reptiles to dominate the ancient skies, pterosaurs had broad leathery wings and slim torsos.
The specimen identified by Myers had a wing span between 12 and 13 feet, or 3.6 to 4 meters. It was discovered in a rock unit that dates to early in the Late Cretaceous.
By Jonathan Betz WFAA Look up and you’ll see Gary Byrd on a roof. That’s where his work is.
But it’s what’s underground that fascinates him.
Every free moment, the contractor roams North Texas digging in the dirt.
“When I was a kid, we’d run up and down creeks and look for stuff, and wonder what it was,” he said. “I just kept doing it, kept finding more interesting things.”
For most of his life, the 55-year-old has scoured construction sites and creek beds for dinosaur bones.
Often, he finds just dirt and rocks. But on occasion, Byrd has unearthed some truly extraordinary finds.
His treasures are enough to fill cabinets at Southern Methodist University.
“This specimen is 89 million years old,” he boasted, displaying the rare remains of a pterosaur, an ancient flying reptile that until now, had not been thought to live in Texas. Byrd plucked the fossilized bones out of a half-built Plano subdivision.
“Finding a fossil of this magnitude is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of find,” said SMU researcher Timothy Myers. “A lot of paleontologists would probably go their entire careers without finding something this significant.”
And that’s not all. Byrd has even discovered a new dinosaur species, a large duck-billed herbivore called Protohadros byrdi — yes, named after Bird himself, who found the remains near a highway.
Science journalist Tim Wall has covered the flying reptile research of SMU’s Timothy S. Myers on his popular Discovery News Online blog. Wall’s March 2 entry aptly warns “Don’t mess with Texas Pterosaurs!”
Myers identified fossilized bones discovered in Texas from a flying reptile that died 89 million years ago. The bones may be the world’s earliest occurrence of the prehistoric creature known as Pteranodon, Myers says.
Pteranodon was a type of pterosaur that lived about the same time as some dinosaurs, about 100 million to 65 million years ago. The only reptiles to dominate the ancient skies, pterosaurs had broad leathery wings and slim torsos.
The specimen identified by Myers had a wing span between 12 and 13 feet, or 3.6 to 4 meters. It was discovered in a rock unit that dates to early in the Late Cretaceous.
By Tim Wall
Discovery News Online
Don’t mess with Texas Pterosaurs! They are the oldest yet found in North America. One recently found specimen may even be the oldest Pteranodon in the world.
The mystery flying reptile a type of pterosaur, took a final plunge 89 million years ago into the waters of the inland sea that once covered the central United States. It sank to the bottom, fossilized, and lay there until amateur fossil hunter Gary Byrd found the ancient aviator’s bones. They were uncovered during the excavation of a culvert in a new subdivision north of Dallas.
Pterosaur Windsurfed Across Surface of Prehistoric Seas
“I found a couple parts of a fish, and then when I saw these my initial thought was that they weren’t fish,” Byrd, a roofing contractor by day, said in a Southern Methodist University press release. “I kind of knew it was something different — a birdlike thing. It’s very rare you find those thin, long bones.”
Byrd already has a species of duckbill dinosaur, Protohadros byrdi, named after him in 1994. He donated the fossils to Southern Methodist University’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.
At the museum, Timothy Myers identified the bones as belonging to the left wing of a pterosaur, most likely a Pteranodon.
New Dino-Eating Pterosaur Evolved in Unusual Way
“If it wasn’t crushed so badly, it would be possible to determine if it really is Pteranodon,” Myers said in a SMU press release. “These bones are easily flattened. They are hollow inside, because they have to be lightweight to allow a pterosaur to fly. So they compress like a pancake as they’re embedded in layers of rock.”
Unique specimen is first of its kind discovered as far south as Texas, where it flew over a vast ancient sea
Fossilized bones discovered in Texas from a flying reptile that died 89 million years ago may be the earliest occurrence of the prehistoric creature known as Pteranodon.
Previously, Pteranodon bones have been found in Kansas, South Dakota and Wyoming in the Niobrara and Pierre geological formations. This likely Pteranodon specimen is the first of its kind found in Texas, according to paleontologist Timothy S. Myers at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who identified the reptile. The specimen was discovered north of Dallas by an amateur fossil hunter who found various bones belonging to the left wing.
Pteranodon was a type of pterosaur that lived about the same time as some dinosaurs, about 100 million to 65 million years ago. The only reptiles to dominate the ancient skies, pterosaurs had broad leathery wings and slim torsos.
Adult pterosaur, toothless variety with about a 12-foot wing span
The specimen identified by Myers is an adult pterosaur of the toothless variety and while larger than most birds, wasn’t among the largest pterosaurs, Myers said, noting it had a wing span between 12 and 13 feet, or 3.6 to 4 meters. It was discovered in the Austin Group, a prominent rock unit in Texas that was deposited around 89 million years ago, early in the geological time period called the Late Cretaceous.
Pterosaurs, many of which survived on fish, lived at a time when a massive ancient sea cut across the central United States. The Western Interior Seaway was a shallow body of water that split North America in half from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
More than a thousand Pteranodon fossils have been unearthed from the middle part of the seaway.
No definitive Pteranodon specimens have emerged from the southern part that is now Texas.
The SMU specimen, if it is Pteranodon, would be the first discovered so far south in the Western Interior Seaway, said Myers, a postdoctoral researcher in SMU’s Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.
Left wing suggests Pteranodon; cause of death a mystery
Key to identifying the SMU fossils as Pteranodon is a humerus of 5.7 inches, or 14.5 centimeters. The humerus is the uppermost bone in the wing and attaches to the torso. The humerus of the SMU specimen, while complete, did suffer some damage during fossilization when it became compressed and distorted through millions of years of compaction.
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“If it wasn’t crushed so badly, it would be possible to determine if it really is Pteranodon,” Myers said. “These bones are easily flattened. They are hollow inside, because they have to be lightweight to allow a pterosaur to fly. So they compress like a pancake as they’re embedded in layers of rock.”
While it’s difficult to narrow the humerus definitively to a specific genus and species, some features clearly identify the specimen as part of the Pteranodontidae family, most likely the genus Pteranodon. It exhibits, for example, the prominent warped deltopectoral crest that is characteristic of members of the Pteranodontidae family, called pteranodontids, he said.
Discovered along with the humerus were parts of the elongated fourth finger that in pterosaurs forms the wing. The SMU specimen’s metacarpal — at 20 centimeters — is incomplete, missing an estimated 37 percent of its length.
The fossils do not solve the mystery of the reptile’s cause of death, Myers said. But it appears the animal probably died in flight over the sea and then fell into the water. Its carcass probably floated for some time, so that when the flesh decomposed the bones separated at the joints, known as “disarticulation,” before they settled to the sea floor and were buried.
“We know it was disarticulated when it was buried because the bones weren’t preserved in correct anatomical position,” Myers said. “Abrupt truncation of the broken end of one of the bones and infilling of the break with sediment also indicates that the breakage and disarticulation took place prior to burial.”
May be oldest Pteranodon in world
If the specimen represents Pteranodon, Myers said, it would be the oldest one in North America by 1 million to 2 million years, and the second oldest pteranodontid in the world.
Pterosaurs were alive from the Late Triassic — more than 200 million years ago — to the Late Cretaceous, evolving from small-bodied creatures to some of the largest animals to ever inhabit the skies, Myers said. An older pteranodontid specimen, belonging to the genus Ornithostoma, previously was identified in England.
“Any pterosaur material is fairly rare to find unless you have exceptional preservation conditions. They are frail, fragile bones, and they require rapid burial to be well preserved,” Myers said. “The SMU specimen was deposited relatively far offshore in deep water, perhaps 50 to 80 feet deep. It’s fairly exceptional because of the number of elements. Typically you’ll only find one piece, or one part of a piece in the local rock.”
During the Early Cretaceous, many types of pterosaurs lived around the world, Myers said. The earliest ones had thin, razor-sharp teeth. In the transition from Early to Late Cretaceous, the toothed variety disappear from the fossil record and toothless forms, like the SMU specimen, become more common, he said.
Dallas area specimens illustrate pterosaur evolution
North Texas is fortunate to have had both the toothed and toothless kinds discovered in the area, illustrating the evolutionary transition, noted Myers.
Besides the toothless specimen just identified by Myers, an older toothed pterosaur, Aetodactylus halli, previously was discovered in the Dallas area. Aetodactylus, also identified by Myers, lived 95 million years ago.
“This new specimen adds a lot more information about pterosaurs in North America,” Myers said. “It helps constrain the timing of the transition from toothed to toothless because there’s only a few million years separating this specimen and Aetodactylus.”
Amateur fossil collector Gary Byrd of Rockwall, Texas, discovered the new SMU pterosaur fossils about 10 years ago.
A roofing contractor who keeps an eye out for fossils, Byrd made the find after stopping to look at two freshly excavated culverts while driving through a new subdivision in Collin County. Using a hammer and pick he dug out the bones and brought them to SMU paleontologists Louis Jacobs and Dale Winkler. Jacobs and Winkler indicated the fossils were likely a pterosaur. Byrd donated the fossils to SMU’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.
“I found a couple parts of a fish, and then when I saw these my initial thought was that they weren’t fish,” Byrd recalled. “I kind of knew it was something different — a birdlike thing. It’s very rare you find those thin, long bones.”
This isn’t the first time Byrd has hit it lucky finding fossils. In 1994 he discovered dinosaur bones that he donated to SMU’s Shuler Museum. The specimen was identified as a rare primitive duck-billed dinosaur and named Protohadros byrdi after Byrd. — Margaret Allen
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