'Where Did You Dig Up That Old Fossil?'

Out in the Badlands of Valley County lie the last remains of a herd of duck-billed dinosaurs. No one knows for sure how the little group of Hadrosaurids met their end.

But, paleontologists from the Badlands Dinosaur Museum of Dickinson, North Dakota are collecting forensic evidence to make a best guess.

"They had a bad day somehow," Dr. Denver Fowler, PhD., Curator of the Badlands Dinosaur Museum, told The Courier during a recent visit to the dig site. "A little herd of them all died. All the same species. Different growth stages though. Some of them are half-grown or slightly smaller."

Fowler is an interesting character. He originally hails from Britain, but wears a big cowboy hat and could be mistaken for American until he speaks with a British accent.

He and a team consisting mostly of unpaid volunteers recently completed field work at several sites on public lands in Valley County administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Altogether, there are about 40-active dig sites county wide at locations well off the beaten path.

"You can't get out there even with an [all terrain vehicle], unless you jump the creeks 'Dukes of Hazard' style," Fowler said. "It is pretty tough."

At one of these remote sites, the fossilized remains of duck-bills were found unearthed by erosion and discovered by BLM.

"They took us here in 2016 and we stepped out of the truck to find an articulated arm of a duckbill sticking out of the slab," Fowler said. "That is the one that is in the BLM office in Glasgow. There were skin impressions. We only found those later in the lab. We came back the next year, hunted around and found all kinds of cool stuff."

About 378 duck-bill bones have been found at one of the sites, Fowler said.

"There are definitely six individuals there," Fowler added, noting this can be determined because paleontologists have discovered six right sided femurs which must have come from six different individuals.

The duck-bills died in a prehistoric delta feeding the Western Interior Seaway. The seaway once extended from what is now known as the Arctic Ocean down through the Gulf of Mexico, splitting North America into two separate land masses - Appalachia to the east and Laramidia to the west.

"It would have been a bit like the Mississippi Delta building out into a sea," Fowler said.

The remains of the duck-bills, a prey species, were eventually covered in sedimentation. They are located in a layer known as the Judith River Formation, Fowler said. This layer is found beneath the Bearpaw Formation and above the Claggett Shale formation.

Current data suggests the bones have been lying in repose for the past 75.5 to 78 million years, Fowler said. Paleontologists are working now to narrow that window down to within about 10,000 years using the fossilized remains of ammonites at the dig sites. Ammonites are an extinct species of marine mollusc animals once living in the Western Interior Seaway.

"If you can find one, you can date the rock where it comes from," Fowler said.

Scientists in a laboratory contracted by the museum use Argon-argon dating to determine the age of the specimen, Fowler said.

"That is when potassium decays radioactively into argon. You can also use uranium as well. The lab that works for us uses Argon-argon dating. That will give us a precise date within about 10,000 years. The ammonites [themselves] give us a rough date, but the precise date within about 10,000 years or so is amazing."

With this additional data, paleontologists are able to theorize about the world the duck-bills would have lived in.

"They were doing great," Fowler said. "They were getting real fat out here on the delta. It would have been really boring, really flat and covered in lots of tasty vegetation. These duck bills had a grand old time eating. Then the tyrannosaurs came out and ate the duck bills."

Fowler's team has discovered the remains of tyrannosaurids near the site of the duck-bill remains.

These remains are not representative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, a related species. Still, they were quite the predator in their time.

The Tyrannosaur stood on two legs and had two short forelimbs with two clawed digits. They could grow up to 40-feet in length and weighed in at a whopping six metric tons. Their mouths were full of serrated teeth, and one of their favorite meals were duck-billed dinosaurs.

But was it a hungry Tyrannosaurus that killed the six duck-bills at the dig site? Was it a prehistoric murder scene?

Answering that question is all part of the fun, said Marcello Toscanini, of Quincy, Massachussets. Toscanini graduated in 2019 from Salem State University with a bachelors degree in geo sciences, and spent much of this summer out hunting for dinosaur fossils with Fowler in the Badlands.

"That is actually my favorite part," Toscanini said. "I am really into trace fossils, which is basically any type of fossil that doesn't include the actual body of an animal. That could mean bite marks, foot prints, scratch marks. That is literally a detective scene. You find a bone, and it has got bite marks all over it. Who did this? Get the yellow tape and everything. You get to work based on the evidence left behind. We are looking for the most likely explanation, what we have the most evidence for."

Determining if the six duck-bills discovered were part of the same group and died at the same time is a question Fowler and his team are working to answer.

"Dinosaurs laid lots of eggs - 20 or 30 in a clutch," Fowler said. "The babies hatch out. Maybe there is a little parental care, but maybe not much. Then, they are probably out on their own for a bit. One of the thoughts is maybe they got together again when they were a third grown, or a half grown. You get these little groups of youngsters maybe hanging out together. We don't really understand it well right now, and that is why finding these sites where you get lots of different individuals together can allow us to start looking at these hypotheses. Do they have the same life history? Were they perhaps a group? How about we test that? It is a cool question."

Playing in sand

This summer, fowler and about 13 or so volunteers lived in tents on the edge of the Badlands, venturing out each day - weather permitting - to carefully dig out each site.

Sand "is a friend and adversary," said Steven Clawson, originally of Chicago. Clawson holds a bachelors degree in geology with a minor in biology, and conducted grad work at Cal State Fullerton before coming to Valley County with Fowler.

"It is pleasant to dig in, especially when it rains or the wind is blowing," Clawson said sarcastically. "Especially here [at one of the Tyrannosaur dig sites], we get a little dust corridor. I have coverings I use to keep it out of my eyes, my mouth. In general, I have to say it is a friend."

That is because sand may hide a treasure trove of fossils waiting to be dug up and studied.

Clawson said he prefers sand to mud stone, which encases the duck-bills the team has been studying.

"Mud likes to rip apart in blocks," he said. "If you rip apart a block that is too big, it tends to delaminate the bone."

This can cause the bone to shatter, Clawson said.

"It is just not fun to foil up and fix."

Alyssa Wiegers, an incoming sophomore at the University of Chicago majoring in environmental and urban studies and public policy, joined the team this summer to get some real world experience.

"Being outside after a year of college mostly in doors and online, it is definitely a good contrast to what the last school year has been," she said.

Dirt and sand have been Wiegers constant companions, she continued.

"You just sort of get used to it. You learn your threshold, what you are OK with. At the beginning, I was really dirty all of the time. There was dirt on my water bottle, dirt on my snacks. But, you learn to brush it off and it is fine. It doesn't really bother me much, but I have been here for two months. I am just sort of accustomed to it."

"I think it will be interesting going back into civilization and seeing how I adapt," Weigers continued. "There are a lot of behaviors here that don't really translate. It is very minimal living, but I have work to do."

Wiegers will return to the classroom later in September. While her majors do not necessarily line up with digging up dinosaurs, the life experience she has accumulated is priceless, she said.

"I am hoping to find a way to go into more environmental policy, so this is connected in some way. Even if it is not, it is a cool thing to do. I am learning a lot about something I think everybody is interested in. Nobody hates dinosaurs."

Wiegers has been with the team since July. The adventure has certainly changed her life perspective, she said.

"I think that you can definitely get by with less than you think you can. I did not know what to expect, so I brought a bunch of clothes. I thought I would be wearing different clothes every single day."

That was not the case.

As a member of Gen Z, Wiegers found herself deprived of wi-fi and cell service perhaps for the first time.

"Everybody says Gen Z is obsessed with our phones, but that hasn't really been too much of an issue. I am not against being on my phone. When i have it, I use it, but it hasn't interfered with living or my happiness."

All in all, it was nice to get away from the grind, Wiegers said.

"Most of my first year of college was in my dorm room on my computer. Here, we literally live outside and then I go sleep in a tent."

Watching the dig sites grow and change over the last couple of months has been "really cool," Wiegers said.

"Going up on top of a hill and seeing it from a distance day after day and us slowly chip away - it just looked completely different than how you see it now. There was this huge pile of rubble and it seemed almost impossible. 'Oh my God, this is never going to go away. We are never going to be able to dig it all.' But, we did and it is really cool to see what people and one jack hammer can do. That completely changed how this looks."

And the social aspect was a welcome change from COVID-19 restrictions in a large city, Wiegers said.

"It has been a really special experience being in camp for two months, meeting everybody who was here for a few weeks at a time."

In a way, it was summer camp for adults, Wiegers said.

"It really is, and seeing the culture of the camp change as different people move in and out is really interesting. There are lots of personalities here."

Clawson agreed.

"Meeting all the new volunteers every year, watching them cycle through, learn new things" has been enjoyable, he said. "Most of them, it is their very first time doing something like this. They might not know exactly what to expect, and depending on what site they are working, the die roll differently."

Finding intact fossils is a crap-shoot. Some of the volunteers found nothing while others much, Fowler said.

A taste of paleontology

During the height of the dig this year, the camp was humming, Fowler aid.

"It was busy. There were mostly students this year, so it had its own vibe. We definitely had some of our retired regulars not come out because of COVID. They are still lying low."

The digs are nonprofit in nature, with the fossils being placed in museums for public benefit, Fowler said.

Because the dig is nonprofit, it relies on volunteers, including students.

"There are not as many opportunities for students to go on these kinds of digs as there used to be," Fowler said. "When I used to be at the Museum of the Rockies, we had crews of 40 people. A lot of the other institutions don't take volunteers from other institutions. It used to be different and I think it is bit of a shame in its own way. There are a lot of pay digs, but we don't charge people to come out and dig. Some people pay up to $2,000 a week to go and dig dinosaurs at some of these commercial pay digs. And then, the dinosaurs they dig up get sold. It is kind of crazy. We work on public lands, and with volunteers. That is a really important part of what we do. We don't sell these fossils. We collect them for the American public to hold in trust. They will be on display.

These means future generations can enjoy the fossils for generations to come.

"People will be talking about this site for 100 years or a 1,000 years," Fowler said. "The specimen will be in a museum. It is really nice specimens. They will be important."

Fowler uses each dig as an educational tool for the student volunteers.

"We teach people about the rocks and how to dig and that kind of thing," he said.

And, Fowler encourages interested students to write research papers which will be submitted to the scientific community. This year, a student who did not find any fossils was given the chance to write a paper on a Tyrannosaur being excavated. This specimen may represent a new species never before discovered, Fowler said. If that is the case, it will be known as "Sisyphus," named after the character in Greek mythology who is damned to roll a large boulder uphill in Hades for all eternity. The name was chosen, Fowler said, because of the Herculean task of unearthing the remains mostly by hand.

The paper is a great way to introduce the student into the world of peer-reviewed paleontology, which can become controversial and lead to heated arguments, Fowler said.

For the students "it gives them a taste of research," Fowler said. "I have carried a couple of them through, now, to the publishing point. There are five or six different people."

Publishing a first paper is a big step, Fowler said.

"I think it is. I was helped out in that way by a Doctor Robert Sullivan at Pennsylvania State Museum. He is retired now, but he helped me through a first paper and I think it was really helpful."

Writing a paper under the tutelage of an expert removes some of the uncertainties, Fowler continued.

"When do you draw the line? When is it good enough to submit? I like to be the person who pulls the trigger. I will decide when it is ready to go, and the pressure is off of them a little bit. They go through the whole process, and usually it is a project no one can complain about too much."

With a new species, "no one can say you are wrong," Fowler said. "Everybody wants to see it in print."

Conflict is second nature among paleontologists, Fowler said.

"If we describe a new taxidermy on here, there will be some people who don't think it is. That is fair enough. A lot of the research I do, I like to do ideas work and behavior work, and that can be quite controversial. How do you talk about the behavior of dinosaurs when all you have is a bunch of bones? It can be theoretical. Looking at proportions and comparing them to modern animals, some people think that is not appropriate. It can be quite controversial. But, first projects and early research for undergrads, a good description, it is not going to be controversial and they can get through the whole process and feel confident about it. That is one thing I really want, people to come out and work with us to have that opportunity to see if it is something they want to get into."

Wiegers certainly appreciated that approach.

"It has been a really good experience," she said. "This is my first time ever doing anything like this. I feel like, under the guidance of these paleontologists, I could do this again in a different setting. I know the basics and I know a lot more about geology. I don't know everything, but I have more of a grasp than I did when I showed up, which I think is important."

During the fall and winter seasons, Fowler and his team will return to a laboratory setting to clean up the fossils they have found. They expect to be back in Valley County to continue their work next year.

For more information about Dickinson Museum Center, visit http://dickinsonmuseumcenter.com/badlands_home/