Big, Toothy, and Conveniently Dead: Why We Are Obsessed with Dinosaurs, Featuring Anthony Fiorillo, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science

[Opening strum of theme music]

[00:00:00] Tony Fiorillo: ‘Cause the helicopter’s coming in day X and we have to be ready. So we really didn’t have much time. So, we started finding these other pieces, the front of the lower jaw of a Pygmy Tyrannosaur, and we named that Nanuqsaurus, which is polar bear lizard. A full-sized Tyrannosaur might be 40 feet in length.

[Guitar Strumming]

[00:00:19] This is about 20. So it’s definitely not something you curl up with in front of a fireplace. But down here in Southern New Mexico, we have tyrannosaurs and they’re really big tyrannosaurs. So, having this continental wide perspective, we can ask the question, why did Nanuqsaurus grow so small? And why are they so big down here?

[Reflective, Calming Music]

[00:00:38] Emily Withnall: ¡Bienvenidos! This is Encounter Culture from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. I’m your host, Emily Withnall.

[Pensive Music]

[00:00:46] Emily: I keep saying that the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science is one of my favorite museums, but I should confess: it is my favorite museum. Part of it is nostalgia. I grew up visiting the museum and brought my own kids there when they were young.

[00:01:06] I have photos of them curled up with the giant stone eggs there. And when I was young, I remember shrieking with fellow girl scouts as we tried to avoid the lava floor. The other part of it is the dinosaurs. Although I wasn’t the type of kid to rattle off dinosaur names and facts to every adult in earshot, I was fascinated by them and remain fascinated by them.

[00:01:30] And as Dr. Tony Fiorillo, executive director of the New Mexico Natural History Museum and Paleontologist reveals in my conversation with him for this episode, his dinosaur phase, which also started by visiting a natural history museum as a child, turned out to be a lifelong obsession. In fact, he helped identify New Mexico’s newest dinosaur.

[00:01:54] We did not discuss it in this episode because at the time of our conversation, the information hadn’t been published yet. More information is now available at media.newmexicoculture.org. I was particularly intrigued when I found out that Tony researched Arctic dinosaurs. Before we spoke, I had read that some dinosaurs actually looked a little different than scientists had previously imagined.

[00:02:20] Relatives of the Velociraptor had feathers, for example, and some dinosaurs had fleshy rooster-like crests. So, when I heard about the arctic dinosaurs, I began to conjure images of hybrid dinosaur polar bears in my head. The reality of the Arctic dinosaurs is much more interesting and complex than that, though. Among other factors, dinosaurs were very adaptable, which Tony thinks is good news for humans.

[00:02:46] I. Although we’ve been on the planet for a far shorter duration than the dinosaur’s reign, we’ve proven ourselves to be fairly adaptable too. I’m always grateful when scientists like Tony are optimistic. It’s easy to draw comparisons between their mass extinction and the accelerating loss of biodiversity.

[00:03:05] We are currently witnessing on our planet that some scientists call the approach of what could be the sixth great extinction. So when a paleontologist tells me that life will continue on earth and that this life will likely include humans, it makes me rest a little easier. From discussions about the first discovery of the Alamosaur in New Mexico, to how paleontologists identified dinosaur tracks, to the migration of dinosaurs across the Bering land bridge.

[00:03:36] Please join us for a delightful conversation about these endlessly fascinating creatures that preceded human life on earth.

[Music Fades]

[00:03:51] Emily: Welcome to Encounter Culture, Tony, it’s great to have you here.

Tony: Thank you.

Emily: I was very excited to learn that there were Arctic dinosaurs, which is why I reached out to you. But first I wanna say that I grew up in New Mexico and I grew up going to the Natural History Museum, and I know you’re the executive director there, right?

[00:04:10] Tony: Yeah.

Emily: And it is one of my favorite museums.

Tony: I’m glad to hear that.

Emily: I brought my kids there when they were little too.

Tony: How old are they now?

Emily: They are 20 and tomorrow my youngest will be 17.

[00:04:24] Tony: Well, they are still age-appropriate. Yes.

[00:04:28] Emily: (Laughs) Yes, that’s true. Before we kind of get into Arctic dinosaurs, I’d love to ask you why are humans so interested in dinosaurs and what can they tell us about ourselves or the world?

[00:04:46] Tony: That’s a great question and that’s something that gets discussed quite a bit. It almost falls into the area of philosophy because every market study about dinosaurs, going back to the first unveiling of dinosaurs, sculptures in the 1850s in London, people have been drawn to them. So, it’s not a recent phenomenon.

[00:05:09] It’s something that ever since we found the first fossil tooth, people have been interested in this subject. So, why? And you can probably get a whole bunch of answers as to why, but I think that if you really think about it, you mentioned that you have a couple of kids, they’re older now. But what kid does not at some phase in their growing up have nightmares and what is it they’re having nightmares over?

[00:05:36] Oftentimes it’s because some monster is chasing them. So, I think in some ways dinosaurs tap into something very primal within humans. That dinosaurs are big, they often are toothy, but they’re also conveniently dead. So they become a very safe way to engage with something primal and that nightmare world that so many of us had that window.

[00:06:05] Emily: I’m interested also that you mentioned the dinosaurs in London in the mid-1800s because I was in London in May, and I went to Crystal Palace to see the dinosaurs there.

[00:06:17] Tony: The Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins sculptures?

[00:06:20] Emily: Yeah. And they look not like what you would see at the Natural History Museum. So, I would love for you to talk a little bit about why, when fossils were first being found, people thought they looked the way they do in those sculptures in London, for example, which look very like big iguanas or something, and how over time we’ve come to realize what they do look like.

[00:06:44] Tony: The original discoveries were very fragmentary. A tooth here, a bone there, and there’s a gentleman from back in that time named Gideon Mantell, who gets oftentimes credited with finding some of the first fossil material. What I find—and we’re talking about Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins sculptures and how odd they look now within the modern context—

[00:07:09] but I actually find how often these guys were right, based on really fragmentary material in in part comes from the fact that the original discoveries were found by people who really knew anatomy, the doctors of the time. And their reconstructions, yeah, they’re kind of fun to giggle about now, but in many ways, they were right more than they were wrong.

[00:07:36] So I respect that. If you’ve been to Crystal Palace, I’ve only seen photos. I’ve never actually been there, so. In some ways I envy your experience. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins is also responsible for the first dinosaur skeletons here in terms of putting them on display. And there were a number of discoveries in Europe where dinosaur skeletons were found.

[00:08:01] But here in North America, here in the United States, uh, I grew up on the East Coast. So, you grew up in New Mexico. So, living on the East coast, there was always this aura or magic to, oh, the American West. That’s where all the cool stuff was found. So imagine my bemusement or disappointment to discover that the first dinosaur skeleton ever found in the United States came from Haddonfield, New Jersey.

[00:08:29] Haddonfield has embraced that, and that skeleton is actually in Philadelphia at the Academy of Natural Sciences. And Hawkins is the one who mounted the skeleton for display in 1850… I don’t actually remember the date. It might be 1858. It might be 1860. The point being that the public response to the first dinosaur skeleton here was so extraordinary that the museum, as a means to control the crowds, implemented a entrance fee.

[00:09:01] Like that’s how that museum started charging, was to control the crowds to see this amazing skeleton.

[Ambient Sounds of Museum Crowds]

[00:09:11] Emily: So, what interested you about dinosaurs and how did you get into studying them and researching them?

[00:09:20] Tony: My parents credit my grandmother with taking me as a small child on the city bus across town to the local Natural History Museum, and they said that I never outgrew that, that experience as a two-year-old or three-year-old.

[00:09:35] I think the question for me is not so much, how did I get into it as why I never outgrew it because of that experience as a very young child with my grandmother going to a dinosaur hall.

[00:09:46] Emily: So, you just kept that fascination and studied that in college?

[00:09:51] Tony: Well, kind of. Okay. I hope my mother doesn’t hear this.

[00:09:54] Mothers being what they are when their kids grow up, they start cleaning the room and so the little childhood library of dinosaur books I had to recreate. Which was not that hard, but I decided I wanted to recreate my original little library as a fifth grader, and so I have those books again, not the original ones, through elementary school and on into middle school.

[00:10:18] I was fascinated by those things, and so I did a lot of reading and probably the happiest day of my life, it was when I turned 16, got my driver’s license and can drive myself to that museum instead of bugging somebody to take me. But as we all grow up, there’s that window where your body changes and your interests change.

[00:10:37] And I became interested in sports and things like that, so there’s a pause. But then when college came around, I still didn’t know what I could do. I didn’t know that you could make a living doing, actually what I’m doing now, but I went on a field trip with a friend of mine, a makeup field trip for geology that I thought, sure, why not?

[00:10:59] I’m not doing anything else this Saturday. And that’s sort of when the switch went to the on position. I thought, this is amazingly cool. I need to give this a try.

[00:11:10] Emily: I’m assuming that there’s a pretty big difference between what your workday looks like when you are at the Natural History Museum in Albuquerque versus like being in Alaska doing research. (Laughs)

[00:11:24] So I would love for you to, if you can visually describe what you do, like are you on the ground? Like how does that work when you’re looking for evidence of dinosaurs.

[00:11:36] Tony: One of the things that I love about my position is that no two days seem to be the same, and they range from the administrative needs for running the Natural History Museum to those times when I can take an hour here or an hour there and think about the science, because being a paleontologist, that’s what brought me to the game, and so I can’t lose that.

[00:11:59] I do spend a lot of time reading and thinking about what dinosaurs may or may not have been doing, where might the next discovery be, et cetera, et cetera. But then there’s the things that come with office work that present other challenges, which are equally interesting to me. Running a natural history museum, sometimes I’m still pinching myself that I actually do this because it’s so rewarding.

[00:12:24] And then when you walk through the halls, and you see the school groups or the senior groups or the high school kids pointing and smiling or posing and so on. I just find it incredibly rewarding as far as, those are the daily extremes of one is office-oriented, the other one is living out of a tent somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

[00:12:46] There is a seasonality to the work I do. If I’m working in Alaska, for example, you don’t go there in the dead of winter. You go there when it’s cooperative weather. It’s never boring.

[00:12:58] Emily: When you’re living out of a tent in the summer in Alaska, are you looking for bones or tracks or what are you looking for?

[00:13:05] Tony: We’re looking for whatever we can find. And I’m not trying to be flip. To go to Alaska for a few moments. I’ve spent 24 years working up there and when I first started working up there, I think the number of dinosaur localities that were documented, you can count on one hand. Now you’d certainly need both hands and probably your toes and more to count up all that we have discovered.

[00:13:29] It’s not just me, there’s a team involved and it’s actually a pretty big team. By now, we probably work with somewhere around 150 international colleagues. There’s a smaller group of us that work more regularly and then the team in the field. It’s a smaller group still. We’ve been working together for years now.

[00:13:53] Part of the fun is, I don’t know if you’ve looked at a map of Alaska, the road system there is not exactly robust. And so, if you want to go somewhere, one of the first challenges is how do I get there? And then you figure all that other stuff out. You have to like bugs, you have to like bad weather or at least tolerate those things. But it’s really a lot of fun.

[Upbeat Music]

[00:14:17] Emily: When you say that you could count the number of localities on one hand before you and this big research team you’re a part of started finding more, what does that mean? What is a dinosaur locality?

[00:14:35] Tony: When you find something that’s dinosaur, whether it’s a track, whether it’s a bone, that becomes a site.

[00:14:42] And some of the first dinosaur discoveries in Alaska were—we were talking about Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in the 1850s—the first dinosaur remains that have been documented come from about the late 1970s, early 1980s. So, by comparison, Alaska is a broad frontier. At that time, those discoveries were mostly driven by oil geologists.

[00:15:09] For example, there’s a photo in Alaska Geographic magazine of some footprints in an area on the Alaska Peninsula. That was one site. Another site was again some extraction geologists, and I think they were oil, but they could have been minerals. They were working some remote river in Northwestern Alaska and they found some pieces.

[00:15:32] They weren’t bones, but they were coprolites and footprint-like things. That was another locality was this river, and that’s how we document our localities. For example, Denali National Park had no dinosaur discoveries until 2005, and now there’s somewhere between a hundred and a bazillion of them. Like Denali is one of the richest places to go look for dinosaur material now.

[Nature Sounds, Dinosaurs Roar]

[00:16:00] Emily: Are these things that you’re finding footprints or bones, or just any evidence of dinosaurs being there? Was it from the same time period or is it spanning a huge swath of time?

[00:16:15] Tony: It sort of depends on what you mean by time period.

Emily: Okay.

[00:16:21] Tony: There’s the work we did in Northern Alaska, in Denali, and then in a park in southwestern Alaska called Aniakchak National Monument.

[00:16:28] Those are all from about a similar timeframe, which is about 70 to 72 million years ago. Then where we were working in August is about a hundred million years ago. There’s that way to slice time. Then when you’re actually in a place like Denali or Aniakchak and you’re finding a footprint or two here, and then you move 50 meters that way and find a couple more footprints over here.

[00:16:56] It’s reasonable to say those are two different time points separated by anywhere from weeks to months to even a couple of years, but it depends on the resolution you’re after.

[00:17:05] Emily: What is known about what the climate in Alaska was like when there were dinosaurs there?

[00:17:12] Tony: Well, that was one of the things that intrigued me and many of my colleagues, was the first dinosaur remains from the north were found not in Alaska, but they were found in Svalbard where there were these dinosaur footprints found in about 1960.

[00:17:29] And that really challenged the stereotype because if you dial back to that time and think about the artwork that was presented, dinosaurs were always in tropical or subtropical environments. They were in swamps, et cetera.

[00:17:43] But now you have these things way up north. That didn’t make any sense if you used the standard reptilian physiology model for dinosaurs. That was part of the fun, was challenging that stereotype with respect to the climate and now dialing into the Alaskan part of the story. Climate has a lot of variables.

[00:18:04] Modern climate, when they talk about modeling. But when you go back in time, you have pretty good control on what we call mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation, and you have some sense as to what the topography was like. So, Alaska back then, based on the tools available to us, was warmer than it is today.

[00:18:23] And what do I mean by that? Mean annual temperatures similar to, say, modern day Calgary down to modern day Portland, Oregon. So, it’s warmer, but not balmy, if you will. The landscape was coastal plain for the most part. When you think of the tundra of the Northern Alaska that’s today. Back then, there were a lot of trees, open spaces with meadows and herbaceous plants growing through there.

[00:18:53] So open woodlands in general on the landscape. There were mountains in the distance, but the dinosaurs were on these coastal points.

[00:19:01] Emily: What does that change then about what we know about dinosaurs if it was thought that they did live in more tropical places?

[00:19:09] Tony: Well by finding them in the high latitudes—and there’s certainly some that have been found in Southern Australia and Antarctica—

[00:19:17] now, what it says is that dinosaurs were highly adaptable animals, that you can’t characterize the group of dinosaurs by one statement. That they were highly successful and they occupied a variety of habitats, and so it’s a chess board rather than a linear statement about dinosaurs with this.

[00:19:38] Emily: I’m very curious about this because I’ve read about birds being dinosaurs or being descended from dinosaurs, which is the more accurate statement?

[00:19:48] Tony: If you’re old enough, birds were kind of related to dinosaurs. Close cousins. But now we have a bunch of new fossil discoveries, and if you looked at paleontologists and surveyed the whole lot of ’em, they would call birds, dinosaurs. The terms they use are avialan dinosaurs and non-avialan dinosaurs.

[00:20:11] So birds being the avialan dinosaurs and non-avialan dinosaurs are the dinosaurs that most people think of.

[00:20:19] Emily: So all of the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct.

[00:20:22] Tony: That’s right, that’s right. And you know, maybe it says something about me, but when I used to talk to school groups, the younger ones. And you’d give them an overview of dinosaurs and we’d all have a good time.

[Emotional String Music]

[00:20:33] Tony: And then some of them would actually get all teary-eyed when you got to the extinction event. And I’d lead them down that path and you could see those little guys just get so depressed ’cause they were gone. And then bring back that birds are dinosaurs and that they could go home if they have a bird-feeder and tell their parents they actually have a dinosaur feeder and that would make them all happy again.

[00:20:55] So I just played with their little minds a little bit.

[00:20:59] Emily: That’s so funny. (Laughs)

[Emotional Music Crescendos, Turns Hopeful]

[Invitation to visit NM Museum of Natural History and Science]

[00:21:01] Emily: I grew up going to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and have fond memories of walking on the lava floor and sleeping among the dinosaurs with my Girl Scout troop. The museum is a New Mexico favorite for a reason. It is the land of Enchantment’s window into our natural and scientific heritage.

[00:21:26] Travel through time with the largest collection of fossils in the Southwest and explore the cosmos through the museum’s 16-inch observatory telescope.

[00:21:37] The state-of-the-Art DynaTheater and 55-foot full dome planetarium feature, rotating family friendly programming, ensuring that there’s always something new to explore. Visit nmnaturalhistory.org for tickets, showtimes, and more.

[End promo]

[Hopeful Music Rises]

[00:21:56] Emily: I’m curious if there’s a link between what you’re finding in your research in Alaska and some of the dinosaurs that have been found in the Southwest.

[Music fades]

[00:22:09] Tony: The broad statement of how this Alaska work ties to New Mexico is that all of the dinosaurs we find in New Mexico from the Cretaceous, and that’s the timeframe we’re talking about, let’s call it, that 70-million year window, a little older, a little younger.

[00:22:27] All of those dinosaurs came to New Mexico through the Bering Land Bridge, which is Alaska today. Except for one, which is Alamosaurus, which is the four-legged long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur that belonged to a group called Sauropods, and if you think of the Sinclair Dinosaur logo, that’s it. They came through the southern hemisphere through a different land bridge, but all these other dinosaurs, the big predatory dinosaurs, the horned dinosaurs, The duck billed dinosaurs, there’s this connection.

[00:23:00] So if you understand what’s happening in Alaska, you’ll actually understand what’s happening or what happened down here in New Mexico too.

[00:23:10] Emily: Oh, interesting. So there was only one dinosaur that came from South America?

[00:23:16] Tony: Yes, the Alamosaurus.

[00:23:18] Emily: Okay. Do people know why there were so many that were coming across the Bering Land Bridge and down and just one that was coming from the south?

[00:23:27] Tony: This starts to tap into a lot of things we still don’t know.

Emily: Okay.

[00:23:31] Tony: And with respect to sauropods at this time, they’re a southern dinosaur. Utah’s about as far north as Alamosaurus has been accurately documented. New Mexico: that’s our contribution, one of our contributions in paleontology is the original Alamosaurus was found here in New Mexico.

[00:23:52] So Alamosaurus is basically our New Mexico icon in the dinosaur world. That was done by people at specimens at the Smithsonian. We have some on display at the New Mexico Museum in Natural History & Science, so it’s a fairly common, it belongs to, as I said, sauropods, but they’re a specialized group of sauropods, just to throw more jargon out there, called Titanosaurs.

[00:24:15] And Titanosaurs came from Africa or South America and they’ve been found throughout those continents. And actually, South America is just crazy rich with sauropods. And so when there was some means to get animals migrating, expanding their ranges as opposed to migrating like birds do seasonally, it came up from the south.

[00:24:36] Emily: What’s known about why dinosaurs were expanding their ranges?

[00:24:41] Tony: It’s highly variable. It depends on the environment, the climate. With sauropods, there have been some suggestions that, you know, you think of these great big behemoths and you would think they can go wherever they want, but there is a life history from, like us, you’re born and then you die.

[00:25:00] And so if the conditions aren’t right throughout that life history, that would create a barrier to expanding into a different area if the environmental conditions aren’t right. So, with respect to sauropods, there was a study based on a very, very bright individual who looked at eggshells and nesting environments for dinosaurs and suggested some types of dinosaurs preferred some kinds of substrates for nests, and others preferred different ones.

[00:25:27] So at a very high level, it would suggest that the environmental conditions for sauropod nesting were right up until you get to someplace like Utah and then the environmental conditions change, and that’s about as far as they could go. So that’s for sauropods. And then with respect to expanding from Central Asia into North America, through Alaska, presumably those filters weren’t really in place and those dinosaurs could come through and adapt to those environments to get into North America.

[00:25:57] Emily: So, is there anything that we as humans can learn from dinosaurs for our own existence and future on the planet?

[00:26:08] Tony: I think dinosaurs tell a very positive story. It’s something where in some ways, if you will, they were very successful because they could adapt to different environments, different times, climates, and so on.

[00:26:23] We know that dinosaurs were living in the high latitudes. We know that they were doing the things that dinosaurs do, nesting, rearing young, et cetera, et cetera. So I think they are in some ways a story of hope. We have climate change issues in front of us. How do we adapt to those? And I think sometimes these dinosaur stories tell us, yes, there’s things that will be different, but the dinosaurs did it. So we should be able to figure it out too.

[Soft Music]

[00:26:54] Emily: So, we will be like, the birds, is what we’re hoping for?

[00:27:00] Tony: Yes. If we take it that way, as opposed to we turn into bird brains, which is not exactly flattering.

[00:27:08] Emily: (laughs) Yeah. I didn’t mean that way.

[00:27:11] Tony: Yes. Um, some of them did go extinct. Yes. We can’t get around that, but you know, the sort of traditional dinosaur that we think of, they were around for somewhere around 150 million years.

[00:27:25] That’s a pretty long time. So they knew what they were doing. And in terms of, do the dinosaur stories that we think we know tell us where to build homes in the future? No, they don’t. But I just think it’s a positive message that life adapts to the situation, and we need to remember that, that we will figure things out.

[00:27:46] Emily: Because at this point humans have been not on the planet for as long as dinosaurs were on the planet.

[00:27:54] Tony: Correct.

Emily: So perhaps there is hope that we will adapt as the dinosaurs did.

[00:27:58] Tony: I don’t know. People can be pretty stubborn, but yes.

[Pensive Percussive Music]

[00:28:11] Emily: So, this might be kind of a niche museum question, but I don’t remember if the Natural History Museum in Albuquerque, when my kids were little, talked a lot about climate change. I am certain it did not when I was a kid. So, when do museums that are based on science have to change their exhibitions in the way that they tell a story?

[00:28:35] Like how much research do you need to make that change and to realize, oh, we need to be telling this story differently?

[00:28:43] Tony: That’s sort of a scalar question. We had an empty case, for example, in our dinosaur hall, a big case, and what we had missed was we didn’t have an Alamosaurus story. So, let’s fill the case with an Alamosaurus story, a New Mexico icon, that was simple.

[00:29:01] When you’re talking about something bigger, you reference climate change. We actually do have a hall on climate change, but it’s dated. It might be 12 to 1500 square feet. And it was well before my time at the museum. It’s probably at least 15 years old. Science moves on. I mean, one of the things that museums can do and should do is show science as a process, as opposed to, let me show you what I think I know about this, this, and this, and impart all this knowledge on you.

[00:29:32] I think one of the most important things we can do for our community is show the process, because that will make people trust us when we actually have messages, and then they will understand why some of that message might change. With respect to climate change, we’ve got that space. But we’re really telling 15-year-old stories as opposed to what is our current thinking?

[00:29:55] What are the tools that are telling us the most information, and how to guide us forward with modeling future climate change. So it’s on my list of things to change. I just haven’t gotten to it yet.

[00:30:05] Emily: Yeah, yeah. What is one of the most interesting things that you’re most excited about in your research right now?

[00:30:13] Tony: I would say there are a lot of things. I’m just very grateful that I’ve been able to spend a career to follow my curiosity. And there’s obviously other things I’ve had to do, but I would summarize my career as that. I have been very fortunate to be able to do that. I can be very curious about a lot of things.

[00:30:35] So in terms of what’s exciting me now is sort of what I’m working on right now. And then once that’s done, then it’s the next thing I’ll be working on. We just had a paper publish last week on some dinosaur footprints that we found in the Aniakchak National Monument. That was a lot of fun to write and put together.

[00:30:55] Now that it’s published, moving on to the next project. We did this amazingly awesome trip on the Yukon River in sort of western Alaska. We were out for about a month from the time I left Albuquerque till the time I got back, but we were about three weeks on the river, and that was, brand new spot. No one, no scientific team had gone in there before.

[00:31:18] I’ve been around the block a couple of times, but there’s no way I could’ve predicted the success we would’ve had. We went about 120 miles on the Yukon River and we found 93 track sites, and you’re impressed by that number, but we’re all jaded professionals, and we had the same facial expression of like, what did we just walk into?

[00:31:37] Part of me is having to show some discipline, like don’t abandon these ongoing projects till they’re finished to jump into this exciting new candy store. Let’s finish this before we get to that. So I’m having a lot of conflict in the evenings when I’m dedicated to certain projects. Get these finished before I can jump to that. So those are the sorts of things that get me ramped up.

[00:31:59] Emily: I’m curious about how you find tracks. I’m assuming that the average person who doesn’t know what they’re looking for wouldn’t know that they’re seeing them. Is that accurate?

[00:32:09] Tony: Well, yes and no.

[Light Electronic Music]

[00:32:11] Emily: Okay.

[00:32:12] Tony: In that we’ve all walked the beach somewhere, so we can recognize footprints, ours, birds, what have you. And sometimes they are that obvious—

[00:32:22] Emily: Oh wow.

[00:32:23] Tony: in the fossil records. Sometimes they’re not. And our practice is, there’s three of us that have been working together very closely over the years. And now there’s a fourth person who has worked with us for the last three years.

[00:32:37] When they’re obvious, yes, document. Get out the GPS unit. Start taking notes. When they’re not so much, we play this little game where you build a little pile of rocks and you’ll get it from all angles. And then I’ll invite one or more of my colleagues, come over here and I won’t say anything. Let’s just say, do you see something?

[00:32:58] And if they see exactly what I see, ’cause I’ll have them, I think I see something. And if they see the same toes I do, then that’s a confirmation that it might be real. And if two or three of us see the same thing, but if I’m looking at this thing, looks like it has three toes and they come over and look at that rock slab, but they see something completely different in another part of the rock slab.

[00:33:21] It’s like, well, I’m just hallucinating. We move on. That’s part of how we do it. Sometimes they are subtle, but sometimes it looks like the animal walked by there last week.

[Music Fades]

[00:33:33] Emily: So is there a way to confirm it once you’re pretty sure that it is a dinosaur track?

[00:33:39] Tony: These days, the state of footprint studies is moved beyond confident.

[00:33:45] We start to take a lot of pictures and that falls into the category of a technique called photogrammetry because you take these pictures from different angles around a track or set of tracks, and then they can be stitched together that you can create a 3D model.

[00:34:03] Or you can do a heat map, and those if you’re suspicious, sometimes that stuff, it’s like, how did I even question this? It’s so obvious.

[00:34:10] Emily: What preserves a footprint for 70, uh, whatever, however many million years.

[00:34:14] Tony: 70 to 100 million years or so

[00:34:17] You’ve walked across a beach and you know when it’s dry sand, that footprint you’re leaving is pretty ephemeral. If you walk across mud, that mud can harden.

[00:34:27] Sometimes a microbial mat will cover that surface and that will create a harder surface, and that’s how something gets preserved. If that surface gets hard, the next flooding event fills the surface, and then you’re on your way to preserving some tracks. ’cause now it’s buried and protected. One of the concepts that’s a little hard to get across is that when you have a stack of rocks and there’s some footprints in there,

[00:34:52] A lot of times I’ll give a talk about footprints and people will see raised footprints versus depressed footprints, and I don’t mean psychologically depressed, they’re pushed into the mud. If they see the raised ones, what’s happened there is the surface that an animal walked on was softer. Then what filled in the footprints?

[00:35:12] So when the rocks get hardened and the erosion happens, that softer material gets removed. So if it’s a raised footprint, and we have some on display at the museum, which you’re actually looking at is the infilling of a footprint. But if you see a depressed track, you might be looking at the surface, the animal actually walked on.

[00:35:32] Emily: Interesting. So, we’re leaving all kinds of tracks for future people to find. (laughs)

[00:35:38] Tony: Maybe. Maybe.

[00:35:41] Emily: I know that since we’re on the podcast, you can’t actually display them, but you brought some things in with you. Can you describe them and what they are?

[00:35:48] Tony: Sure. They’re casts of a couple of bones that are collected in Northern Alaska.

[00:35:53] One is the jawbone. The lower jaw of a horn dinosaur called Pachyrhinosaurus, and it’s a close cousin of things that are a little bit more familiar. People like Triceratops and New Mexico’s own Sierraceratops, which was found a few hours south of Albuquerque. Pachyrhinosaurus is famous because, or distinct from, those dinosaurs in that it’s got this enormous boss on its nose.

[00:36:18] So in some ways it kind of looks a bit rhino-like compared to a triceratops. And we were excavating, we call it a quarry, but it was an area probably four meters by four meters. It was on top of a 300-foot bluff in the middle of nowhere, and we collected about 13,000 pounds of dinosaur bones. Most of them belonged to Pachyrhinosaurus while we were excavating that dinosaur and we’ve got skulls and so on, some of the bones we were finding had tooth marks on them, like when a dog chews a bone and leaves those grooves.

[00:36:55] Emily: Wow.

[Upbeat Electronic Music]

Tony: And so we’re sitting there excavating, hacking through the ice and like, who is eating our horned dinosaur? I don’t know. But we have to get—because the helicopter’s coming on day X, and we have to be ready. So, we really didn’t have much time to think about these sorts of things.

[00:37:12] So once we got back to the lab, did the work on the Pachyrhinosaurus, which we got to name by the way, ’cause it was a new species of this kind of dinosaur. We started finding these other pieces. And the other piece I brought is a cast of the front of the lower jaw of a pygmy Tyrannosaur, which, so I got the name two dinosaurs from the same hole in the ground.

[00:37:34] Emily: Wow.

Tony: How crazy is that? And we named that Nanuqsaurus, which is “polar bear lizard”, because in the Arctic today, polar bear is kind of the top dog. And it seemed like the Tyrannosaur would be the top predator of this ecosystem. And what’s nice about that, is that was a Pygmy Tyrannosaur. So by that I mean a full-sized Tyrannosaur might be 40 feet in length.

[00:38:01] This is about 20 feet in length, so it’s definitely not something you curl up with in front of the fireplace. But down here in Southern New Mexico, we have tyrannosaurs. They’re really big tyrannosaurs. So having this continental wide perspective, we can ask the question, why did Nanuqsaurus grow so small and why are they so big down here?

[00:38:21] And those are questions we’re getting at now.

[00:38:22] Emily: Those were the ones that were leaving the tooth marks on the other one?

[00:38:26] Tony: Nanuqsaurus, yeah.

[00:38:29] Emily: Were they actually biting so hard they were biting through the flesh to the bone, or were they chewing on the bones later?

[00:38:35] Tony: Well, we won’t know that. But the tooth marks I’m referencing are really grooves on bones.

[00:38:42] Like something stripping the flesh off.

Emily: Oh, I see.

[00:38:46] Tony: Yeah. Now whether it was part of the kill or whether it was scavenged, I can’t tell you that.

[00:38:50] Emily: Yeah, interesting.

Tony: But they were, they’re not puncture marks, like they’re chewing up bone.

[00:38:56] Emily: Oh, okay.

Tony: They’re, they’re more like scraping meat off bones.

Emily: I see.

[Upbeat Electronic Music]

[00:39:00] Emily: So you named two dinosaurs. That’s very exciting.

[00:39:11] Tony: I’ve named more than that, but I named two from Alaska.

Emily: Okay.

[00:39:16] Tony: And being interested in the land bridge connection, I’ve actually focused a fair amount of time in Japan and there I’ve named four more. But one of my former students is the preeminent vertebrate paleontologist in all of Japan, and he’s at Hokkaido University.

[00:39:31] And so it’s through that connection that I’m working with Japanese dinosaurs.

[00:39:36] Emily: I would love to hear a little bit about when you find a new dinosaur, how do you move from that to naming and what is involved with the naming process?

[00:39:46] Tony: I, It’s kind of fun. There’s a lot of other aspects of the work we do that I find as satisfying and more satisfying when it comes to reconstructing ecosystems, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:39:56] When it comes to finding bones, for example, your first question is, okay, I found a bone. Who is it? And you start to look at it in terms of, which bone is it? Is it a leg bone? Is it a jawbone? So on, and so on. But then you start to look at the features of the bone, and then you compare it to what’s been described.

[00:40:14] If it’s the same, then you say, okay, I have this dinosaur bone and it is this dinosaur that’s already been described. But when you start to see differences, that’s when you start to wonder, is this something new? Then what you do is when you name something, it becomes a hypothesis. We are proposing this is a new animal based on this set of data that we think we see, and then it goes out for review.

[00:40:38] You end up finding who your friends are and who they’re not. In that everybody can take their shots at it or support it, and then if you make a compelling case that you have something new, then you name it. Now, how do you name it? That’s up to the people who are doing the study. It would be entirely inappropriate for me to find something and then name it ‘Tonysaurus,’ like that’s just bad form.

[00:41:03] It’s better form for me to find something, give it to my best friend and have them name it after me. That’s part of the process. In the case of, we mentioned Nanuqsaurus, we were trying to, if you will, honor the people who lived on that land and those, the Iñupiat, that is their traditional land. And so we used our connections to those communities to make sure we spelled nanuq appropriately.

[00:41:26] So we used that. Then when your species name, it could be a benefactor, it could be a rock unit, it could be a local geographic feature. Some of that decision-making is the choice of the research team, and we have tried to use the names from the people who live there first. One of our most prominent dinosaurs from Japan is a dinosaur called Kamuysaurus.

[00:41:53] It’s the most complete duck-billed dinosaur from Japan, and that name comes from the Ainu people, we had to appear in front of their governance to say, can we use this name for the dinosaur? That’s the approach we’ve used. But there are other people that it could be a feature of the bone itself, so it’s highly variable.

[00:42:14] Emily: And how does it become official so that like if someone else found this new dinosaur somewhere else, there aren’t just a bunch of different names for the same dinosaur floating around?

[00:42:26] Tony: And that has happened.

Emily: Okay. (laughs)

Tony: You write up your report and then you submit it to a journal. It gets peer reviewed, and sometimes it gets re-reviewed, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:42:36] And once it’s in print, then if another scientist is interested, they should be looking at this, like that’s the practice. You’re looking at the reference material. And if there are differences, then you start on your own separate path. Maybe you’re familiar with Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus.

[00:42:55] Emily: I don’t know about Apatosaurus, but Brontosaurus, yes.

[00:42:58] Tony: Right, because that was an iconic dinosaur. But that’s an example of Apatosaurus was found down in Colorado and it was based off of hips, and this was back in the 19th century and it was named Apatosaurus, but that’s pretty much all that was found were the hips.

[00:43:15] Then we go up to southern Wyoming where, and these are 150 million year old dinosaurs, so this is shifting timeframes entirely. That’s where they started finding dinosaur skeletons in large numbers for the first time. And one of those dinosaurs was Brontosaurus, and then that name, because it was more complete, took off with the public imagination.

[00:43:37] Eventually people started to look at these bits and pieces and say, wait a minute, the hips of Apatosaurus are absolutely identical to the ones of Brontosaurus. Apatosaurus was named first, so Brontosaurus is a junior synonym is what we call it, and Brontosaurus went away, and that’s how that works sometimes.

[00:43:57] Emily: Oh, wow. Have you actually constructed a full skeleton of a new dinosaur?

[00:44:03] Have you found enough bones to make a skeleton?

[00:44:06] Tony: It’s very, very rare that you would ever find a complete skeleton. As a matter of fact, if you find half a skeleton, you feel pretty good. It’s just the nature of the beast. I don’t know if you’ve wandered very many pastures and come across a dead cow.

[00:44:21] Scavengers will come in and remove pieces. Sometimes a flood will come through and remove pieces, so it’s very, very rare to see a full skeleton. So, just an insider tidbit, if you go into a museum and see full skeletons, they generally composite skeletons where the original material might be there and then they filled in the blanks with either parts of another dinosaur or something closely related to give you these big, beautiful skeletons.

[Soaring Instrumental Music]

[00:44:51] Emily: Is there anything else that you would wanna share with us?

[00:44:55] Tony: I marvel over, as a kid you go into a museum, you hopefully are inspired and you get curious. In my case, I managed to do that for decades, and so my message is I hope the New Mexico public and our visitors come to our museum and can have a similar experience to walk away from the building after a visit and be inspired by what they saw.

[00:45:19] Emily: I hope so too because as I said, it is one of my favorite museums.

[00:45:24] Tony: Don’t be a stranger.

Emily: Yeah. (Laughs)

[Music Bridge into the Show Outro]

[00:45:26] Emily: To learn more about New Mexico’s Alamosaurus, our many volcanoes, and the Mars Rover, and to explore the many other exhibitions and hands-on science activities at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, check out nmnaturalhistory.org.The museum is open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM daily except for Tuesdays.

[Instrumental Music]

[00:45:56] Emily: Encounter Culture is a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

Our producer is Andrea Klunder at the Creative Imposter Studios.

Season five is produced and edited by Andrea Klunder and Alex Riegler.

Our recording engineer is cabbie at Cabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe.

Technical Direction and post-production audio by Edwin R. Ruiz.

[00:46:20] Our executive producer is Daniel Zillmann.

Thank you to New Mexico artist El Brujo D’Santi Nava for our theme music.

For a full transcript and show notes, visit podcast.nmculture.org or click the link in the episode description in your listening app.

I’m your host, Emily Withnall.

The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs is your guide to the state’s exceptional museums, historic sites, and cultural institutions.

Travel through time and explore the cosmos at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science. Visit nmnaturalhistory.org for tickets, showtimes, and more.

[00:46:48] Emily: Thank you for listening and if you learned something new, send this episode to a friend or share it on social media. We love celebrating the culture of New Mexico together.