DALLAS — The 66-million-year-old story of duck-billed dinosaurs in the Arctic and their connection to previous species in Texas is being decoded in a basement lab and archive at Southern Methodist University thanks to the recent discovery of more fossilized footprints at a remote site in Alaska.
"By the time we are done we think this might be the most integrated dinosaur story, certainly in the North, but possibly anywhere in the world," said Anthony Fiorillo, Ph.D. Fiorillo is an SMU Earth Sciences faculty member and a senior fellow at SMU's Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.
"We are giddy over the results this summer!" he said.
Fiorillo and a team of paleontologists, in cooperation with Hokkaido University in Japan and the University of Alaska Fairbanks recently returned from their latest two-week expedition to Alaska's Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve where Fiorillo first found duck-billed dinosaur footprints 20 years ago. This time they found 40 fossilized footprints of adult and young duck-bills (Hadrosauridae) in addition to fossilized leaves and other plant life from the era.
"Bones tell us who might have been at the dance. But because footprints are recording behavior, the footprints tell us what they were dancing," Fiorillo said of the Cretaceous discovery. "This place is just shot full of dinosaur footprints and more."
The remote location on the Alaskan Peninsula, reachable only by plane or boat, is the least-visited place in the National Park System. But, home to a six-mile-wide caldera from an ancient volcanic eruption, it has become a draw for paleontologists like Fiorillo. Avoiding both bears and mosquitos are occupational hazards, as is surviving the weather. Five days of the two-week trip were lost to severe storms.
"Most kids are interested in dinosaurs at some point. And the phase is either short or long. I'm sort of the kid who never outgrew that phase," Fiorillo said. He's also a former curator for the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.
"We wake up as optimists, but most often we go to bed as pessimists. And then you wake up, you do it again. But when you find it," he said of discoveries made on his most recent trip, "there are little victory dances that somehow get had while we're out there."
"We are very excited by the quantity of what we found as well as the integration as to what we now think we know."
Fiorillo's most recent discoveries will be published in detail later this year.
In addition to the most recent duck-billed footprint casts that Fiorillo returned to Dallas with, The Shuler Museum of Paleontology in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences houses research and teaching collections of fossil vertebrates, invertebrates and plants. In addition to encouraging paleontological research by SMU undergrad and graduate students, the Museum "supplies exhibit specimens to public museums, including the Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History."