Mojoceratops
I ran across the first skull in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History. At the time, I was looking for evidence of T. rex feeding, traces, as part of the T. rex cannibalism paper. I saw this beautiful ceratopsian frill, and recognized it as the type of thing that was pretty common in Dinosaur Park. And just out of curiosity I was wondering what species it was- and I realized, I didn't know.
Hesperonychus elizabethae
…after an internship at the Bird Division of the Smithsonian that saw me working on the weird ibis Xenicibis, I was hooked on paleontology. It was the collections that got me- wandering through endless rows of cabinets, drawers full of ivory-white skeletons, iridescent jeweled skins of tropical birds. It made me think that if there was a God, then he’d have a place like this… one of everything on file, for reference purposes.
Albertonykus borealis
Alvarezsaurs have always fascinated me because of their bizarre morphology, and so when I was studying fossils from the late Campanian Dinosaur Park in Alberta, I kept a careful look out for them. Without any luck- despite looking at hundreds if not thousands of bones, there wasn't a single one that could be identified as an alvarezsaur.
Chenanisaurus barbaricus
The phosphate mines of Morocco are one of the richest fossil sites in the world. Producing vast numbers of shark and mosasaur teeth, they may be the largest fossil dig in the world. They represent the remains of an incredibly productive ancient sea. At the time, sea levels were high, flooding North Africa, and the plains south of the Atlas Mountains were a shallow sea, full of mosasaurs, elasmosaurs, marine turtles, and sharks. Giant marine pterosaurs wheeled overhead. Oceans aren’t the first place you’d search for a dinosaur, however.
The K-T Mass Extinction
The history of life is punctuated by mass extinctions- severe, global, and geologically rapid events that wipe out vast numbers of species. Five extinctions are ranked as more severe, more intense, than all the others. These are the Ordivician-Silurian extinction, the late Devonian extinction, the Permian-Triassic extinction, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction, and the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction. The K-Pg extinction used to be the Cretaceous-Tertiary or K-T extinction (which is unfortunate because 'K-Pg' is less catchy than 'K-T'. And 'Pg' makes you think of a Disney movie that is fun for the whole family, which it most certainly would not have been).