An Update on the Progress

 

 

 

Describing a Jurassic maniraptoran dinosaur from the Morrison Formation of North America – Update

Dean R. Lomax

That escalated quickly! Our project was successfully funded by so many incredibly generous individuals in mid-March, and on behalf of the team we say a huge thank you. Just over a month later and the entire team have met, studied the new dinosaur and have already begun writing-up the detailed scientific description.

The specimen, from here on out referred to as ‘Lori’, was transferred (and placed on loan) from the Big Horn Basin Foundation, Wyoming, to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, so that it could be studied in more detail and so that parts of the specimen could be micro CT-scanned. This required that Bill Wahl (Wyoming Dinosaur Center, USA) and I (the University of Manchester, UK) travel to the University of Wisconsin to spend a week studying Lori alongside Scott Hartman and Dr Dave Lovelace.

On April 24, I flew out to Madison to meet with the rest of the team and study Lori. This entailed detailed discussions and a thorough reanalysis of the bones of Lori. We carefully reviewed every single (visible) bone of Lori and assessed previous identifications of each element. We were able to identify new bones (and features) that had previously been misidentified or missed, which provided additional information on the skeleton of Lori. Bill Wahl, who originally found Lori in 2001, pieced together the entire skeleton. This was very important as each member of the team could see and understand how Lori was found, how all of the pieces fit together and also provide us with an insight into the taphonomy (what happened to Lori between the time it died and when it became fossilized) and original position that Lori was found in.

Much of Lori’s bones are still embedded in matrix, although many are complete and their important features can be assessed, some of these elements are only partially or minimally exposed. As Lori had previously been CT-scanned, we had the opportunity to delve through scan data and see the full extent of such elements, and thus allow for their positive identification. Some of these elements were still difficult to identify and we plan to have some of these blocks micro CT-scanned to uncover even finer details.

In addition to carefully examining the bones and discussing their identification, we also took countless photographs (probably over a thousand!) to ensure we captured every single detail that we could – hey, we needed to take advantage of our time together, right!

With all of this in mind, we have albeit nearly completed the phylogenetic analysis (to see how Lori relates to other maniraptoran dinosaurs) and have begun to write the scientific paper. We plan to have the paper submitted later this year and have the research made open access. I guess the last thing to say is, “can we all science faster please?”

And an update from Dr. Dave Lovelace:

We have scanned the specimen in our regular CT (which is avery high-end machine) and we are trying several novel resolutiontechniques. Micro-CT is planned for later this May. Good data so far!

Once again, Thank you to all who helped fund this project! We wouldn't have gotten this far without all your help!