A visit from a new dinosaur and thoughts on nomenclature
Paul Sereno (center) talks with reporters in the museum's Hall of Ancient Life
This weekend the museum received a surprise visit from Paul Sereno, paleontologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence from the University of Chicago. Most folks with a natural history bent will recognize Dr. Sereno from his National Geographic specials. He’s something of celebrity in the popular dino crowd.
Last week, Dr. Sereno garnered quite a bit of press with his description of a brand new dinosaur: Raptorex, a miniature version of a tyrannosaur, from China. The announcement hit the media on the 17th, and Dr. Sereno hit our museum on the 19th, with parts of his new dinosaur in tow.
In truth, Paul was in town for an OU Sooners football game. But he was kind enough to bring along with him casts of Raptorex’s skull and forelimb, and the real fossilized jaw and finger claw from this new diminutive ancestor to the T. rex, thus giving our local media, and some lucky visitors to the museum that morning, the opportunity to see them for themselves and to talk to Dr. Sereno about his find.
The fossilized jawbone and claw of Raptorex
Raptorex was much older than T. rex. It lived in the earlier part of the Cretaceous period, about 125 million years ago. T. rex didn’t show up on the scene until 90 to 65 million years ago – right at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. But it shared many common traits with later tyrannosaurs, including an oversized head with mighty jaw muscles, tiny forelimbs, and big feet on powerful legs meant for running. Raptorex also shows the same enlarged olfactory “bulb” in the brain as T. rex.
If you want to learn more about Raptorex, you can see articles on it here:
http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1710
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/09/17/tiny.t-rex.dinosaur.discovered/index.html
You can also see and hear local coverage of Sereno’s visit to the museum here:
(Oh, I think I should emphasize that Raptorex is not on display in our museum. Dr. Sereno just brought it for a brief visit.)
Paul Sereno (right) shares the cast skull of Raptorex with museum visitors.
This dinosaur was not actually discovered and excavated by Dr. Sereno. It was actually collected in China and smuggled out of the country, then sold to a private collector, Dr. Henry Kriegstein, in Massachusetts. Kriegstein had it looked at by a private lab for identification. When scientists recognized the find as a likely new genus and species, Kriegstein approached Sereno.
Sereno studied the fossil and prepared the scientific paper which “describes” it as a new genus and species. He also named it: Raptorex kriegsteini, in honor of the collector’s father. Kriegstein has agreed to donate the specimen to the University of Chicago, where it will be studied in greater detail and then eventually repatriated to a museum in Mongolia, where Sereno believes the fossil most likely originated.
One of the things this visit made me think of is how and why scientists name species. A new species isn’t just named willy-nilly. Scientists must prepare a carefully researched and well argued description of the new species, pointing out exactly how this specimen differs from other similar animals and why it should be considered a separate species. Publication of this description in peer-reviewed journals grants the status of species. But it’s not forever. Sometimes later scientists will determine, on further research, that two specimens previously believed to be separate species are, in fact, one and the same. Then a new paper is published, and all the previous separate species get lumped back together. Take, for example, the case of the brontosaur.
The animal named Apatosaurus currently on display in our museum’s Clash of the Titans exhibit is one and the same as the animal known to children of the ’60s and ’70s as “Brontosaurus.” They were at that time considered two similar but distinct species. Later scholarship, however, determined that they were the same, in which case the official scientific moniker reverts to the one first given… in this case, “Apatosaurus.”
It happens with modern species, too. Collection managers in our museum spend a good amount of time changing labels on individual specimens and making notations in catalogs as updates occur to species names. New technology makes this even more likely, as scientists are able to compare animals on a genomic level to determine exactly how much genetic information two animals share.
Confused yet? It can be tough to follow. Our collection managers have a “no erasure” rule, by which names on the labels on specimens are physically crossed out and new names written in, so the trail of past names remains intact. It’s not at all uncommon to see specimens in our collections with two, sometimes even three names on them.
If a scientist is naming a new genus: that’s one level up from the species level, like Raptorex… the genus name often has something to do with the way the animal looks, its taxonomic family tree, or the niche it fills in its habitat. The ginormous long-necked dinosaur recently installed in our museum’s Orientation gallery was named Sauroposeidon: Sauro for lizard, of course, and poseidon for the Greek god of earthquakes, because the ground likely shook when this monster walked by. Raptorex is a nice combination of “raptor” and “rex” that calls to mind an image of a nifty little diminutive tyrannosaur, doesn’t it? The second name or species name, is sometimes a way of giving further descriptive information, but often given in honor of a person. It is not capitalized, and a Latinate possessive suffix is tacked on: i.e. kriegsteini = “of Kriegstein.” Sauroposeidon’s species name, proteles, means “perfected before the end,” referring to the fact that Sauroposeidon was one of the very last great sauropods that appeared just before dinosaurs became extinct: the biggest, the best, the final. There’s a third name, too … one that we usually don’t see, but remains in the scholarly papers: the last name of the scientist who named it. In the case of Raptorex, that’s Paul Sereno. And voilá: Raptorex kriegsteini sereno is born. Or Sauroposeidon proteles cifelli.
There is also lots of information online about “binomial nomenclature” and the Linnaean system of taxonomy, rife with rules and expectations and latin terms. But I find it interesting to see the fun scientists sometimes have with the names. Our own museum director and curator of mammals, Dr. Michael Mares, named an Argentinian rodent after his favorite Argentine musical group, Los Chalchaleras: Salinoctomys loschalchalerosorum. (Try saying that ten times fast) Then there’s Masiakasaurus knopfleri, a dinosaur named after the guitarist for Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler.
I could go on and on here.
If you discovered a species, what would you name it?