From: Michael Lach OK, who will be the first to get the Field's "young dinosaur expert" in their classroom this year? -------------------- Young dinosaur expert digs in at Field -------------------- With a big fossil discovery, Peter Makovicky, 29, starts building reputation for himself, museum. By William Mullen Tribune staff reporter August 30, 2001 An almost perfectly preserved skull found last year in the Gobi Desert by the Field Museum's new dinosaur expert is solving the mystery of how a toothless group of beaked dinosaurs managed to eat. Ornithomimids were extremely fast runners with big brains that made them among the most intelligent animals of their time. The first known land-dwelling dinosaurs that filtered food through sieve-like mouths, ornithomimids probably ate like ducks and flamingos. "What I think I might have here," joked Peter Makovicky this week in his Field Museum office as he examined his Gallimimus skull, "is a 15-foot-long, 700-pound duck." Makovicky, 29, arrived in Chicago six weeks ago to take control of the museum's 101-year-old dinosaur fossil collection. The announcement of his Gobi Desert discovery in Thursday's edition of the British science journal Nature means he already is adding luster to the museum's reputation as a dinosaur research center. The museum hired Makovicky, who received his doctorate in paleontology from Columbia University this year, expressly to enhance that reputation and to enlarge its dinosaur collection by mounting major fossil-hunting expeditions. "The main thing I have to do over the next couple of years is to develop a program of field trips, probably to Wyoming and Colorado, that will fill up the Field Museum's coffers with new dinosaurs," Makovicky said. The Field Museum has some of the most prized dinosaur specimens in the world, including the first brachiosaurus, found by the museum's pioneering paleontologist Elmer Riggs in 1900, and Sue, the world's best Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, purchased in 1995. But the museum has never had a full-time dinosaur expert, and when it began to advertise for one several months ago, competition for the post reportedly was fierce. "I thought [Makovicky] was just the right person for the Chicago job," said Philip J. Currie, famed dinosaur hunter for Canada's Royal Tyrell Museum and one of the co-authors of Mackovicky's article in Nature. "For a job like that, you need somebody who is young and is brimming with new ideas. Peter is a top-notch researcher, and he is top-notch at fieldwork, too, and they want him to go out and make new discoveries." Preserved soft tissue The Nature article describes for the first time perfectly preserved soft tissue on the beaks of specimens of two different species of ornithomimids--pronounced orn-ah-tho-MY-mids, meaning "birdlike" in Greek. Ornithomimids were featured in the first "Jurassic Park" movie, when a thundering herd of ostrichlike creatures pours across a meadow, leaping over and around a group of awed and frightened humans. One of the specimens discussed in the article was Makovicky's Gobi Desert discovery, a juvenile of a species known as Gallimimus bullatus. The other was a nearly complete skeleton of a species known as Ornithomimus edmontopicus found by Currie in 1995 in Canada. On both Makovicky's and Currie's specimens, the tissue appears as a tiny half-centimeter-long fringe that hung from the animals' upper beaks. In modern animals, fringed beaks are found on ducks and flamingos, which are known as filter feeders. Living along streams, ponds and lakes, they use their beaks to scoop up plants and tiny shellfish in shallow water, using the fringe structures on the beak, called lamellae, to strain the water from their mouths, leaving the food. In the Nature article Makovicky, Currie and their co-author, Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History, suggest that the ornithomimids ate the same sorts of food as modern filter feeders. "These animals are always found where water is present, and that means they probably were eating brine shrimp and snails," Makovicky said of ornithomimids. Other recent ornithomimid fossil finds have revealed they probably swallowed gravel much like modern birds and reptiles to help grind up and digest hard food particles like marine shells. Since the first ornithomimid fossil was discovered in Colorado in 1890, they have proved to be one of the most ubiquitous groups of dinosaurs ever found, with fossils dug up from China to North America to Spain. They thrived from about 100 million years ago until the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago. Rising star Though young and just out of graduate school, Makovicky already is widely published in academic paleontology journals and is a rising star in the profession. He was born in New Jersey to Czech emigre parents and, when he was 2 months old, moved with them to Denmark, where both his mother and father work as petroleum geologists. As an undergraduate in Copenhagen studying zoology, by chance he attended a lecture delivered in 1993 by Currie on the relationship between dinosaurs and birds. "I was so riveted," Makovicky said. "I went up to him afterward and asked if there was a chance that I could come and do a master's degree studying under him in Canada." Despite some spectacular individual specimens on display at the Field Museum, it has never concentrated on dinosaur research. The museum sent out Riggs in 1900 expressly to find big, spectacular dinosaur bones to attract crowds. He came back with the world's biggest, the brachiosaurus, and some other notable specimens, but Riggs was really a fossil mammal expert and spent most of career in that field. Fossil mammals also happen to be the primary interest of John Flynn, chairman of the museum's geology department, the only other staff member ever to have made significant dinosaur finds. His have been in Madagascar, where he has spent the last decade looking for early mammal fossils, uncovering some notable dinosaurs as a byproduct of that search. Flynn was also one of the key players at the museum responsible for the $8.3 million purchase of Sue's fossilized skeleton and its subsequent display. Sue's presence at the museum probably has given it an overinflated reputation as a dinosaur center. "The number of dinosaur specimens here is not very large compared to places like the American, Royal Tyrell and the Carnegie museums," Makovicky said. "What there is here is excellent material, which I will be able to use for comparative purposes in future research." Copyright (c) 2001, Chicago Tribune -------------------- Subscribe to the Chicago Tribune Today! Good Eating, Your Place, and TV Week -- just a few reasons to get the Chicago Tribune at home every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Subscribe by calling 1-800-TRIBUNE (1-800-874-2863) or online at chicagotribune.com/subscribe -- This is the CPS Science Teacher List. To unsubscribe, send a message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For more information: <http://home.sprintmail.com/~mikelach/subscribe.html>. To search the archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/science%40lists.csi.cps.k12.il.us/>
