91吃瓜网

When 91吃瓜网 Assistant Professor of Biology Michael D鈥橢mic, Ph.D., took three of his students to south-central Utah on a dig for dinosaur bones, the small team went to a relatively new dig, still rich with bones.

鈥淭he chances of finding any bone are pretty much guaranteed,鈥� Dr. D鈥橢mic said, speaking during a rare moment of Wi-Fi access. 鈥淚t鈥檚 just a jumble of bones of 10 or 12 individual dinosaurs that were washed down there.鈥� What they didn鈥檛 expect to find, Dr. D鈥橢mic said, was 鈥渁 bone鈥攁 shoulder blade鈥攖hat doesn鈥檛 resemble any known species as far as I can tell.鈥�

It happened on the first day of the dig. Jacob Virginia, a junior majoring in exercise science, was working on freeing a partially exposed bone and Dr. D鈥橢mic got curious. With the assistance of the two other students on the dig鈥攋unior anthropology major Laura Jacobson and Christina Chahalis, currently working on her master鈥檚 degree in biology鈥攖hey completed the difficult, delicate work of dislodging the shoulder bone from the hard sediment where it had been housed for centuries upon centuries. The bone will now go through a lengthy process of examination before it can be declared a new discovery.

The bones were in a pit in what is now part of federally managed public lands in south-central Utah, managed by the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Illinois, where Dr. D鈥橢mic is an adjunct curator. While the connections to the time before our two-legged ancestors began to walk the earth are invaluable, new discoveries鈥攁rtifacts that don鈥檛 just add to collections of relics but reveal new information about prehistoric life鈥攁ren鈥檛 so common.

But this one was something special. The large and as-yet-unidentified shoulder blade Dr. D鈥橢mic and his students uncovered satisfied what no doubt was a wish secretly harbored by the students. It鈥檚 not unheard of at the site, he said, but it鈥檚 not an everyday occurrence.

The trip also included visits to the Capitol Reef National Park and Arches National Park, where the students were able to visit the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail and (with permission) go off the trail to actually walk into the prehistoric tracks, solidified in stone, which were discovered along the ancient riverbed.

鈥淭his is a more recent discovery,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he tracks were only discovered in 2009. Scientists are really only starting to work on them.鈥�

Dr. D鈥橢mic is no stranger to discoveries. He recently made national news with a paper听that put forth the theory that sauropods grew very quickly with little to no help from their parents. He has also published work strongly suggesting dinosaurs were warm-blooded, a point that has been debated for decades.

听The Utah trip was a first for Adelphi and something Dr. D鈥橢mic hopes to build on in the coming years.