Scientists in New Jersey Working Hard to Preserve Dinosaur Trace Fossils

Palaeontologists and geologists are working hard to gather as much scientific data as possible from a site rich in Jurassic trace fossils before the building of a new housing development is completed. Scientists strive to get as much data as possible from rare dinosaur tracks.

Dinosaur Footprints

The location, part of an extensive development of more than 800 residential homes is in Passaic County, in the north of the U.S. state of New Jersey, the site and surrounding quarries have provided scientists with a number of fossils including a variety of dinosaur footprints preserved in the sandstone strata.

The state of New Jersey is synonymous with important dinosaur discoveries, one of the most complete dinosaur fossils known at the time and the first officially noted dinosaur fossil bone discovery in the United States was made at Haddonfield, New Jersey.  These fossils turned out to be the bones of a duck-billed dinosaur, it was named Hadrosaurus foulkii, although this genus is now regarded as Nomen dubium (the validity of this genus is in doubt).

Meetings have been taking place between Montclair State University professors, state museum geologists and representatives of the building company to discuss how best to preserve the newly discovered dinosaur tracks without holding up the building works.

Locations in the north of New Jersey have provided scientists with a number of dinosaur trackways to study, Dr Matthew Goring, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Montclair State University commented:

“It’s important to preserve as much as you can, but what they can save depends on how they [the builders] excavate the rock.  In some cases there’s just no way to hope the guys digging with a backhoe are going to recognise what they are digging.”

As the large blocks of sandstone are removed, plans are in place for geologists from the New Jersey State Museum (Trenton) to examine them and identify important fossils.

Dr Goring went on to add:

“They’ll be big blocks of rock that they will pick up and put in a pile that will be well worth going through.”

Dinosaur Tracks

However, finding any fossils is the easy part, as Dr Goring admits, if the geologists do find anything of interest they will have the challenge of transporting and rocks to a safe area where they can be properly studied.

Dr Goring put it succinctly when he said:

“Even to just preserve twenty yards of trackway is just tons and tons of rock.”

Retired school teacher Chris Laskowich, has lived in the area for many years and has spent a great deal of time studying the dinosaur tracks and other fossils found in the area.  He put together a petition with more than a 1,000 signatures requesting that this site, marked for building work, could be preserved because of its scientific interest.

Chris stated:

“This one in particular, what’s called the UBC Quarry, has been called the most important quarry in New Jersey and on this side of the Atlantic for the number of species of plants and animals it shows from the beginning of the Jurassic period.”

Exposed fossil bearing strata from the Early Jurassic is particularly valuable to scientists, there are few exposed deposits worldwide and there is still much to learn about the diversity of Mesozoic life around 200 million years ago.  Indeed the entire Triassic/Jurassic geological boundary is still blurred and a revision of the start of the Jurassic period is due to be considered by the International Commission of Stratigraphy (ICS).

Mr Laskowich said that the dinosaur tracks represent a number of genera and they range in size from under 3 cm to over 35 cm long and stated that the site was:

“extremely prolific and it is a shame that it was touched at all”

A spokesman for the construction company said that they had began construction back in 2005 and had called in geologists as construction was nearing completion.  He commented that the company was excited about working with the museum teams to help preserve and record a bit of the history of the area.  The spokesman emphasised the close working relationship between the construction firm, the local community and the scientists.

John McCauley, a professional microbiologist and amateur palaeontologist had put together another petition, this time urging the location of the trackways to be excluded from the development, but as most of the tracks are to be found on private land already approved for building this is not a likely course of action.

He stated:

“Hopefully they can make some agreement where they can preserve these fossils.”

He went onto explain that allowing geologists to sift through excavated piles of rock was not ideal because knowing specifically where the tracks had laid was very important.

Studying Dinosaur Tracks

Theropod print compared to an ornithopod print. Studying dinosaur tracks. Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

Officials at Passaic County have urged all parties to consider issues regarding health and safety, stating that they did not want unauthorised individuals coming to the construction site.

A curator at the state museum, David Parris, visited the dig site last week, with other interested parties, as although the museum  had already removed some fossils from this location, the builders and uncovered new material.

He stated:

“In the course of the construction they uncovered one exposure of rock that has not been seen or previously investigated.”

He went on to add that staff from the museum were willing to work after hours to excavate the new material and that everyone there would do their best to preserve the scientific material that comes out of the site.

Let us hope that a compromise can be reached, cooperation between all the interested parties is paramount in situations like this, after all, Jurassic footprints stopped being made approximately 144 million years ago.

For models of North American dinosaurs, fossils of which are found in Jurassic-aged rocks: Safari Ltd. Wild Safari Prehistoric World Models.

Giant Seabird with a Toothy Grin – Pelagornis chilensis

Soaring over the skies of what is now Chile some 10 million years ago was a huge seabird, unlike any found today, a giant, with a wingspan of approximately 5 metres and a beak full of sharp, pointed “pseudo teeth”.  This large pterosaur-sized creature has been named Pelagornis chilensis and a full paper on this saw-toothed seabird appears in the latest edition of the scientific publication “The Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology”.

Prehistoric Seabird

Fossils of these strange birds ascribed to the genus Pelagornis have been found at a number of Tertiary aged sites, scientists believe that these birds evolved sometime in the Late Palaeogene and survived up until the end of the Pliocene epoch.  The bones of these birds were extremely light and delicate and most of the specimens found to date are badly crushed and very little articulated material is known.  However, this new South American species has been identified based on an “exquisitely and exceptionally preserved” fossil specimen according to co-author of this study, David Rubilar of the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Santiago (Chile).

A Super-soaring Prehistoric Bird

The publication of this paper on this super-soaring prehistoric bird comes at an important time for the museum, as on Tuesday 14th September the Museum celebrated 180 years of scientific work and curation, making this establishment older than the Natural History Museum in London.  The phylogeny (the development or evolution of a particular group of organisms), of these “pseudo-toothed birds” is uncertain, most scientists associate them with the Albatrosses or Pelicans, it is hoped that this new fossil material will help palaeontologists to learn more about the taxonomy of these creatures and their relationships with modern extant Aves.

An Artist’s Illustration of P. chilensis

Picture credit: Carlos Anzures

Pelagornis chilensis

The specimen includes the largest and most complete fossil bird wing yet discovered, the fine grained, sandstone strata in the north of Chile where the fossil was found could yet yield more information about these strange and enigmatic birds.  The tooth-like structures in the jaws are not teeth, but adaptations of the beak that permitted these seabirds to catch and hold slippery fish and squid in their beaks.  Birds lost their reptilian teeth as a result of natural selection, adapting to a need to have lighter skeletons to enable more efficient flight.

The likes of Pelagornis evolved originally from birds with normal beaks, but the “pseudo-teeth” and the albatross-like skeletons suggest a sea-going lifestyle and hunting fish and other slippery creatures out at sea.

Previous fossils of Pelagornis have been badly crushed making it difficult to estimate wingspans, but the superb preservation of this particular specimen has led scientists to confidently estimate that this species had a wingspan of seventeen feet or more, nearly 50% bigger than the wingspan of most modern Albatross’s.  When on the ground, these birds would have stood nearly 1.25 metres tall, about the size of a six-year-old child.

A Close up of the “Pseudo Teeth” in the Beak

The beak with the “peudo teeth”

Picture credit: S. Tränkner, Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg

The picture above shows the robust and powerful beak of P. chilensis.  The “pseudo teeth” superficially resemble the teeth found in a number of rhamphorhynchids, a group of pterosaurs which scientists believe were also mainly fish-eaters.  As the fossil skeleton is structurally similar to a modern albatross’s, studying the albatross may help scientists to understand the likely habits and behaviours of this extinct leviathan.  Note the large orbit (eye socket), in the skull, an indication that these birds had large eyes and probably excellent eyesight.

More fossils might be unearthed soon, as David Rubilar commented:

“The fossils in this [sandstone layer] are abundant… probably we will find more and more complete specimens in the future.”

An Extremely Successful Group of Birds

Estelle Bourdon, a researcher with the American Museum of Natural History (New York), although not directly involved with this particular study, stated that these type of birds were extremely successful and seemed to have existed for many millions of years as a group.  Fossil evidence suggests they evolved in the early Eocene Epoch, went onto establish themselves worldwide and finally went extinct at the end of the Pliocene Epoch.

Perhaps, these creatures filled the ecological niche that was vacated with the extinction of the last of the pterosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic.

Lead author, Gerald Mayr of the Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg (Germany) commented:

“Although they would have looked like creatures from Jurassic Park, they’re true birds and not flying reptiles.  In fact, it is possible some of the the last living members of P. chilensis existed at the same time as the earliest human ancestors in Africa.”

The research team have concluded that P. chilensis was probably a glider, as the skeleton does not permit extensive flapping movement of the wings.

An Artist’s Illustration of the Skeletal Structure of P. chilensis

Pelagornis skeleton.

Picture credit: Carlos Anzures

The artist’s rendering shows the bird’s skeleton and the wingspan, aproaching an impressive five metres.  An analysis of the arm bones shows that this bird could not rotate its wings to flap and provide lift, the research team have concluded that rather like Andean Condors today, these creatures simply “opened their arms” to take to the air, catching updrafts rising from hills and other geological features to become airborne.

Just like many modern, large seabirds Pelagornis chilensis could probably have glided for many hundreds of miles with a great efficiency of effort.

The researchers have compared the arm bones of this new specimen to the bones of Argentavis magnificens, an extinct Condor whose fossils have been found in Argentina.  With a wingspan in excess of 8 metres, it is A. magnificens that currently holds the world record for the largest known flying bird.

However, the arm bone of P. chilensis is nearly 40 percent longer, so co-author David Rubilar is optimistic that larger specimens of P. chilensis could challenge this record.  He pointed out that as A. magnificens probably had longer feathers it retains the world record for the largest flying bird known to science – at least for now.

For us at Everything Dinosaur, it is fascinating to note how the Aves radiated after the Cretaceous extinction event.  This Order diversified and exploited a huge number of environmental niches.  For example, it can be argued that these huge gliders replaced the fish-eating pterosaurs and other types of bird, such as the members of the Phorusrhacidae {thanks for the correction} (Terror Birds) evolved into large, cursorial predators replacing the theropods.

For replicas and models of prehistoric animals including prehistoric birds: Prehistoric Animal Models and Extinct Birds.