This project will combine innovative sampling techniques to trace evolutionary patterns of dinosaur diets and habitats. Combining methods of measuring wear patterns and determining the chemical composition of dinosaur teeth can help determine where these animals were living and what they were eating. The two objectives of this project are to examine the dietary evolution of a group of herbivorous dinosaurs called neoceratopsian, and to identify dietary variation in a growth series of protoceratopsian dinosaurs. The goal of this study is to quantify the diets of extinct herbivorous dinosaurs, something that has been previously shrouded in mystery.
This project will provide for numerous mentoring opportunities at the American Museum of Natural History and in the greater New York City area. Moreover, results from these analyses will be disseminated in museum educational programs, scientific papers, and at national conferences. It will expose the public to innovative methods being used to study dinosaurs through the engaging concept of dietary reconstruction.
Despite the fact dinosaurs lived over 65 million years ago, we as paleontologists still wonder about the landscapes and environments they lived in. Fortunately, we are able to use certain inventive analytical methods that can help us figure out what types of food these dinosaurs were eating, and in turn, what sorts of environments they lived in. In this project, we examined dinosaur fossils from Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, a place where we find a rich variety of fossils from dinosaurs and other animals that are around 80 million years old. The teeth of these dinosaurs, along with pieces of their eggshell, hold the key to understanding the diets and environments of Mongolia in the time period known as the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs dominated the environments on land. As animals live and eat, chemical signatures from their food and drinking water are incorporated into the minerals that make up their teeth and eggshell. We can measure the amounts of chemicals in these fossils, and this can tell us more about the environment the dinosaur lived in and what food it was eating. To measure these chemical signatures, the bones and teeth are ground up and put into a device called a mass spectrometer. This device in turn measures chemical concentrations that we can use to understand the vegetation structure and other environmental factors at the locality. We found that the chemical signatures contained in the teeth and eggshells of the dinosaurs from two different locations in Mongolia were able to tell us information about ancient environments and dinosaur diets we never would have been able to uncover otherwise. During the Cretaceous in the area now known as the Mongolian Gobi, dinosaurs were eating plants that were well adapted to dry climates, indicating an arid habitat. In one locality, they were drinking water from a source where it was not regularly replenished; it appears that after infrequent rains, dinosaurs would drink from evaporated pools. In another nearby locality, we can tell that the environment had more water available for the dinosaurs to drink. We are able to detect differences in environments and so we are better able to understand how the biodiversity of dinosaurs in the region is linked to climate and environment. Our methods of determining diets and environments from dinosaur remains are effective, but more importantly, show us that we have a lot more to learn from fossils in museum collections. The results from this project have been disseminated through scientific articles, international conference presentations, and scientific outreach. Chemical data from this project have been associated with specific museum specimens at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) so it can be incorporated in datasets as future researchers do more of these types of analyses. Additionally, the information from this project was incorporated into lectures given to 40 New York City school students mostly from underrepresented groups in the sciences through a selective program for 11th and 12th graders that takes place at the AMNH. Technical presentations on these data were given at both the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology and American Geophysical Union yearly international meetings.
