Carnegie Museum of Natural History

One of the Four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

dinosaur

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Ask A Scientist – What Kind of Dinosaur is a Megaraptorid?

Are megaraptors really raptors? Assistant Curator and Head of Vertebrate Paleontology Dr. Matt Lamanna discusses what paleontologists know about the dinosaur family Megaraptoridae in our latest Ask a Scientist! See a life-sized replica of a megaraptorid thumb claw from Patagonia up close and find out how a claw like that led researchers to give megaraptorids their name.

 Ask a Scientist is a video series where we ask our research staff questions about the millions of amazing objects and specimens stored in our museum collection. Tune in on YouTube, and submit your own questions via Twitter @CarnegieMNH!

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My Guildey Pleasure

By Andrew McAfee

As the Scientific Illustrator for the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, I spend most of my time in the museum interpreting and representing the paleontologists’ work in visual form. Most of this work takes place at a desk with a computer. But as a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI), I spend one week per year away from the desk, learning new techniques in the field and sharing a few of my own.

The GNSI is an organization of scientists and science illustrators founded in 1968 by illustrators at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The purpose of the GNSI is to advance science illustration by facilitating the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and techniques among its members.

Every year around July, the GNSI has a conference that brings members from all around the world together for a week of plenary speakers, technique expositions, lectures, and workshops. It’s a wonderful opportunity to commune with colleagues in the field of scientific illustration and acquire new perspectives and technical abilities.

Andrew McAfee with his digital painting of Mansourasaurus 
Andrew McAfee with his digital painting of Mansourasaurus (upper left) on display in GNSI’s 50th anniversary exhibition, Visualize: Art Revealing Science, at AAAS headquarters. Photo: Reid Psaltis.

I joined the GNSI in 2013 and have not missed a conference since. This year’s event marked the 50th anniversary of the Guild’s formation and represented a homecoming, returning to Washington, DC. As a part of our anniversary celebration, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—known for, among other things, publishing one of the world’s foremost scientific journals, Science—hosted our annual members’ juried exhibition.

This year I was honored to have two pieces selected for exhibition in the show: my reconstructions of the recently-named dinosaurs Mansourasaurus shahinae and Tratayenia rosalesi, both completed at Carnegie Museum of Natural History under the guidance of paleontologist Matt Lamanna. I was proud to represent the museum and it was gratifying to see my work sharing walls with the stellar work of my colleagues in the AAAS gallery.

Visualize: Art Revealing Science, the 50th anniversary GNSI exhibit, will be on display at AAAS headquarters until October 15, 2018.

Andrew McAfee is Scientific Illustrator for the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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The Two-Headed Dinosaur

Apatosaurus is a sauropod, or long-necked plant-eating dinosaur, that lived in western North America during the late Jurassic Period roughly 150 million years ago. In the early 20th century, scientists couldn’t agree on what kind of head Apatosaurus had. No skull had ever been found attached to a neck of this dinosaur. So, when Carnegie Museum of Natural History mounted its most complete Apatosaurus skeleton in 1915, it did so without including a skull.

Apatosaurus louisae (right) as it was originally mounted in 1915, without a skull. At left is the skeleton of its relative Diplodocus carnegii.
Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae (right) as it was originally mounted in 1915, without a skull. At left is the skeleton of its relative Diplodocus carnegii, better known as ‘Dippy.’ Credit: Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The mount stood headless until 1932, when the museum followed prevailing scientific opinion of the day and placed a blunt-snouted, broad-toothed skull on the Apatosaurus. It remained there for another 47 years.

Apatosaurus and Diplodocus skeletons
Apatosaurus (right) and Diplodocus, ca. 1932, after a skull of the blunt-snouted sauropod Camarasaurus lentus had been mounted on the Apatosaurus skeleton. Credit: Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

In 1978, however, Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist Dave Berman and museum research associate Jack McIntosh reasoned that a very different, more Diplodocus-like skull found with the Apatosaurus skeleton back in 1910 was most probably the correct one. A subsequent discovery of a still-connected Apatosaurus skull and neck proved them correct. In 1979, the museum’s Apatosaurus louisae was finally fitted with its proper skull – more than seven decades after its discovery! It remains that way today, on public exhibit in the museum’s dinosaur gallery, Dinosaurs in Their Time.

Apatosaurus Louise
Apatosaurus as it looks today, displayed with its correct skull, which closely resembles that of its relative, Diplodocus. Credit: Melinda McNaugher, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Matt Lamanna is a paleontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.  Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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Most people know “Dippy” …

ice cream sundae

Most people know “Dippy” by the statue of him outside the museum, which sports seasonal scarves throughout the year. But did you know he recently inspired a new flavor of ice cream at Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor? Social media users chose a mint based ice cream with chocolate chip cookie dough, chocolate chips, and fudge ripple to honor Diplodocus carnegii.

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Time Travel… No Flux Capacitor Required

drawing of the dinosaur crossing a stream in its natural habitat
The newly discovered meat-eating dinosaur Tratayenia rosalesi crosses a stream in what is now northern Patagonia, Argentina some 85 million years ago.
Credit: Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

By Matt Lamanna

I’m a child of the 1980s. When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was Back to the Future, where Doc Brown turns a car into a time machine that sends Marty McFly into the past. I’d watch that movie and think, “How cool would it be if time travel were real?” We could go back in time and, say, hear Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address, or watch Michelangelo paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We could gaze in wonder at the Great Pyramid under construction, marvel at a herd of passing mammoths, or witness a ‘Lucy’-like creature take humanity’s first steps. We could even go all the way back to the Mesozoic Era – the Age of Dinosaurs.

Sadly—spoiler alert!—time travel is still not possible, at least not in the literal way that the creators of Back to the Future imagined. But there is another way to see dinosaurs in the flesh. One only needs a talented artist.

Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to have worked with many artists to (virtually) bring dinosaurs and other extinct creatures back to life. From my old buddy the ‘Wookiee’ Jason Poole, to dynamic husband-and-wife duo Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger, to dino-sculptors extraordinaire Dan Pickering, Gary Staab, and Bruce Mohn, to rising stars Taylor Maggiacomo and Lindsay Wright, and others, each of these gifted natural history artists has graciously shared their time and talent to help my scientific collaborators and I breathe life into ancient bones.

Two artists deserve special mention here. For more than a decade, from 2004 to 2015, I was blessed to be able to work with Mark Klingler, the long-time Scientific Illustrator here in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Section of Vertebrate Paleontology. Mark and I worked together to give the world its first look at many new fossil discoveries, such as the semi-truck-sized dinosaur Sarmientosaurus, the bizarre ‘Chicken from Hell’ Anzu, and the ~120 million-year-old bird Gansus.

Mark gave the museum and I one final gift prior to his departure in 2015: he hosted an intern, Andrew McAfee, then a newly minted graduate of the Science Illustration program at Cal State University Monterey Bay. Andrew continued to volunteer at the museum after Mark left, and did such a fantastic job that, in 2016, we hired him as Vertebrate Paleontology’s new Scientific Illustrator.

Like Mark before him, Andrew is meticulous when it comes to reconstructing a prehistoric species and its habitat. Case in point: our hot-off-the-presses predatory dinosaur from Patagonia, Tratayenia, which was formally announced by my Argentine collaborators and I yesterday morning. Tratayenia is a fascinating dinosaur, and was undoubtedly a terrifying beast in life, but unfortunately, we paleontologists don’t have very much of it – its fossils are pretty incomplete. So how, you ask, was Andrew able to produce the image above?

Well, he and I first had to build a picture of the dinosaur itself. Tratayenia is a megaraptorid, a group of mysterious hunters that roamed South America, Australia, and probably other Southern Hemisphere continents during the Cretaceous, the third and final time period of the Mesozoic Era. Using the bones of other megaraptorids, we made educated guesses as to what the missing pieces of the Tratayenia skeleton may have looked like. From there, we used our knowledge of the closest living relatives of dinosaurs—birds—to put meat, skin, and feathers back on the bones; in other words, to reconstruct the parts of the body that are rarely found as fossils. Finally, since we have almost no idea what color Tratayenia may have been, I encouraged Andrew to get creative here. The pattern he came up with seems suited to an animal that probably relied on stealth and camouflage to ambush its prey.

After we had Tratayenia to the point where it looked ready to jump off the screen and bite us, it was then time to put the animal back into its 85-million-year-old world. To do so, I scoured the scientific literature on the rock formation that yielded the bones of the new dinosaur, looking for clues as to what its ancient environment was like and what other species called it home. Andrew painted several of these plants and animals into his reconstruction. Look for a thigh bone of the giant herbivorous dinosaur Traukutitan and plants such as ferns, horsetails, flowering herbs, and a conifer belonging to the group Cheirolepidiaceae.

We can’t go back in time to the Age of Dinosaurs, not really at least. But through the skill and vision of natural history artists, working in tandem with paleontologists, we can catch glimpses of what these extraordinary animals and their long-vanished worlds may have been like. Andrew and I are already revving up the DeLorean for our next trip to the Mesozoic.

Matt Lamanna is a paleontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Read more about Tratayenia on Reuters.

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The Dinosaur of a Lifetime

color drawing of a dinosaur on a beach
(Image credit: Carnegie Museum of Natural History / Andrew McAfee)

By Matt Lamanna

It might sound a little strange to say, but African dinosaurs have been an important part of my life for a long time. Almost two decades ago, when I was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, and a few years before I took a job here at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, I participated in fossil-hunting expeditions to the Sahara Desert of Egypt. Along with our advisor, my beloved “Boss” Peter Dodson, my fellow students and I had a lot of success, discovering among other fossils the only known skeleton of a new, ~95 million-year-old species that we named Paralititan stromeri in 2001. With a humerus, or upper arm bone, that’s almost as tall as I am, Paralititan is still one of the biggest dinosaurs known to science.

But as fun as those discoveries were to be a part of, some of our team’s most sought-after finds never materialized. In going to Egypt, part of our aim was to find dinosaurs from roughly 80 to 66 million years ago – dinosaurs from the very end of the Cretaceous Period, the third and final time period of the Age of Dinosaurs. Dinosaur fossils of this age are exceedingly rare on all of continental Africa (i.e., Africa excluding the island of Madagascar), not just in Egypt. Surprisingly, however, this has not stopped paleontologists from speculating as to what kinds of dinosaurs might have inhabited Africa at the end of the Cretaceous. Some have proposed that African latest Cretaceous dinosaurs were close relatives of, and therefore similar to, those living on neighboring landmasses at the same time. Other scientists have argued that Africa was an island continent at the end of the Cretaceous, and, because it was cut off from other land areas, it was home to unique dinosaurs that had evolved for millions of years along their own distinctive evolutionary pathways.

Until recently, no one had ever found a reasonably complete dinosaur skeleton from the end of the Cretaceous anywhere on continental Africa. A few isolated bones and minor parts of skeletons had been discovered, but these didn’t tell us much about the dinosaurs to which they belonged – as you can imagine, the more pieces one has of a fossil skeleton, the more one can typically learn about the animal it represents. This, in turn, prevented paleontologists from figuring out whether African latest Cretaceous dinosaurs were truly unique or whether they had close kin on other landmasses. But all of that changed in late 2013, when my friend and colleague Dr. Hesham Sallam of Mansoura University in Egypt—along with his talented students Iman El-Dawoudi, Sanaa El-Sayed, and Sara Saber—discovered the skeleton of a sauropod (long-necked plant-eating dinosaur) at an ~80 million-year-old site in the Dakhla Oasis of the Egyptian Sahara. The dinosaur I’d dreamed about for virtually all of my professional life had finally been found! Even better, Hesham and the team—which also included my close friends Pat O’Connor and Eric Gorscak, plus several other Egyptian and American scientists—invited me to be a part of the study. We soon realized that the creature had a lot to say about the nature of Africa’s last dinosaurs, as its bones suggested close relationships to species living in Europe and Asia at about the same time. These hypotheses were borne out by more rigorous analyses, showing that African latest Cretaceous dinosaurs weren’t island-dwelling weirdos after all – rather, they had close cousins in Eurasia. Today, our team gave the dinosaur its formal scientific name, Mansourasaurus shahinae, and for me, it’s the culmination of a search that’s occupied almost half my life.

Matt Lamanna is a paleontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. 

Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Read more about this news on Gizmodo.