After last year’s very enjoyable SVP meeting in Bristol, I was able to spend some time at the Paleontological Institute in Warsaw. Mike and I were there to look at Gobi ankylosaurs. The Polish-Mongolian Expeditions in the 1960s and 70s discovered many exciting new taxa of ankylosaurs, including Tarchia and Saichania, and an excellent juvenile Pinacosaurus.
ankylosaurs
Into the Gobi….in Mother Russia.
Guess where I was last week?
Some congratulations are in order!
Congratulations to my fellow ankylosaur researchers Mike Burns and Robin Sissons, who defended their MSc theses this week. Mike studies ankylosaur osteoderms and Robin studies ankylosaur feet.
Last December the three of us published a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology redescribing and resurrecting Dyoplosaurus, an genus of ankylosaurid that had previously been sunk into Euoplocephalus. Here we are examining the type (and only) specimen in the Royal Ontario Museum’s collections. We are very photogenic. Many thanks are due to David Evans and Brian Iwama who made time to help us during the final phases of the very busy ROM Crystal palaeo gallery reopening!
Dyoplosaurus paper here via BioOne.
University of Alberta Palaeo Museum
The University of Alberta Laboratory for Vertebrate Paleontology has a small public gallery in the Earth Sciences Building. Although small, it has some very fine specimens.
Let me introduce you to my little friends.
This blog is set up mostly so I can update friends and family about my summer’s exploits in Korea, China and Mongolia, but I may update with other travel and dinosaur news of interest from time to time.
My research is on the ankylosaurid dinosaurs, the ones with tail clubs, lots of armour, and, one may expect, bad attitudes. I like them because they have the thick skin and surly demeanor that I lack in real life.
Here are some pictures from a paper on tail clubs I published in PLoS One in 2009.
Thus does the blogging commence.
pseudoplocephalus 