Page 31 - Introduction to Paleobiology and The Fossil Record

18 INTRODUCTION TO PALEOBIOLOGY AND THE FOSSIL RECORD

cooperation of many people. The spectacular and private funding sources must have con-
Burgess Shale fauna (Gould 1989; Briggs tributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to
et al. 1994) was found by the geologist Charles the continuing work of collecting, describing
Walcott in 1909. The discovery was partly by and interpreting the extraordinary Burgess
chance: the story is told of how Walcott and Shale animals.
his wife were riding through the Canadian The Burgess Shale is a dramatic and unusual
Rockies, and her horse supposedly stumbled example. Most paleontological research is
on a slab of shale bearing beautifully pre- more mundane: researchers and students may
served examples of Marrella splendens, the spend endless hours splitting slabs, excavating
“lace crab”. During fi ve subsequent fi eld trenches and picking over sediment from
seasons, Walcott collected over 60,000 speci- deep-sea cores under the microscope in order
mens, now housed in the National Museum to recover the fossils of interest. Laboratory
of Natural History, Washington, DC. The preparation may also be tedious and long-
extensive researches of Walcott, together with winded. Successful researchers in paleontol-
those of many workers since, have docu- ogy, as in any other discipline, need endless
mented a previously unknown assemblage of patience and stamina.
remarkable soft-bodied animals. The success Modern paleontological expeditions go all
of the work depended on new technology over the world, and require careful negotia-
in the form of high-resolution microscopes, tion, planning and fund-raising. A typical
scanning electron microscopes, X-ray photog- expedition might cost anything from
raphy and computers to enable three-dimen- US$20,000 to $100,000, and fi eld paleontol-
sional reconstructions of fl attened fossils. In ogists have to spend a great deal of time plan-
addition, the work was only possible because ning how to raise that funding from government
of the input of thousands of hours of time in science programs, private agencies such as the
skilled preparation of the delicate fossils, and National Geographic Society and the Jurassic
in the production of detailed drawings and Foundation, or from alumni and other spon-

descriptions. In total, a variety of government sors. A typical high-profile example has been

Box 1.4 Giant dinosaurs from Madagascar

How do you go about finding a new fossil species, and then telling the world about it? As an example,
we choose a recent dinosaur discovery from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar, and tell the story
step by step. Isolated dinosaur fossils had been collected by British and French expeditions in the
1880s, but a major collecting effort was needed to see what was really there. Since 1993, a team,
led by David Krause of SUNY-Stony Brook, has traveled to Madagascar for nine fi eld seasons with
funding from the US National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. Their work

has brought to light some remarkable new finds of birds, mammals, crocodiles and dinosaurs from
the Upper Cretaceous.
One of the major discoveries on the 1998 expedition was a nearly complete skeleton of a titanosau-
rian sauropod. These giant plant-eating dinosaurs were known particularly from South America and
India, though they have a global distribution, and isolated bones had been reported from Madagascar
in 1896. The new fossil was found on a hillside in rocks of the Maevarano Formation, dated at about
70 million years old, in the Mahajanga Basin. The landscape is rough and exposed, and the bones were
excavated under a burning sun. The fi rst hint of discovery was a series of articulated tail vertebrae, but
as the team reported, “The more we dug into the hillside, the more bones we found”. Almost every
bone in the skeleton was preserved, from the tip of the nose, to the tip of the tail. The bones were exca-
vated and carefully wrapped in plaster jackets for transport back to the United States.
Back in the laboratory, the bones were cleaned up and laid out (Fig. 1.12). Kristi Curry Rogers
worked on the giant bones for her PhD dissertation that she completed at SUNY-Stony Brook in
2001. Kristi, and her colleague Cathy Forster, named the new sauropod Rapetosaurus krausei in