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A Rare Bird
Turning
his childhood dream of finding dinosaur bones into a grown-up
reality, Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist
Matt Lamanna hopes that the discovery of an ancient flying
creature provides a missing link in the story of bird evolution.
By John Altdorfer
Matt Lamanna is hungry. It’s a few minutes before two
o’clock on an early October afternoon, and he’s
missed lunch because of an unscheduled, last-minute meeting.
Yet instead of catching a bite to eat, the Carnegie Museum
of Natural History assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology
gladly discusses the one appetite he can’t seem to satisfy—his
love for dinosaurs.
“
I was about four years old when I told my parents I wanted
to be a paleontologist,” says the 31-year-old upstate
New York native. “I was a dinosaur fanatic from the start.”
Today, seated in his office at the Museum of Natural History
behind a massive desk and surrounded by crowded bookshelves,
maps, charts, fossil casts and computer equipment, the obsessed
kid who fantasized about finding dinosaur bones is now an
enthusiastic adult changing the way the world looks at the
creatures who
roamed our planet for more than 150 million years. The Proverbial Foot in the Door
At an age when many paleontologists are looking to snag a temporary
university or museum position, Lamanna is pushing the pedal
to the metal on the expressway to success and recognition.
A little more than two years after receiving a doctorate
from the University of Pennsylvania’s department of
earth and environmental science, he owns one of the top jobs
in his profession and a reputation as an important contributor
to the understanding of how dinosaurs and their environments
evolved. Building on earlier work in Argentina and Egypt,
he made a big splash earlier this year as part of a team
that discovered a prehistoric amphibious bird in the mountains
of northwestern China.
A quarter-century earlier, a Chinese
paleontologist found a tiny fossil bird foot approximately
110 million years old at
a site called Changma, about 1,250 miles west of Beijing.
Following the uncovering of this original specimen in 1981,
no further
avian finds from the site surfaced until a former Penn classmate
of Lamanna’s returned to the region in September 2002.
“
Hai-lu You went to Changma because he knew it was an ideal
place to look for more fossil bird specimens,” says
Lamanna. “He
and his team dug there for a few weeks and found the partial
wing of another ancient bird. When he came back to Penn
in March of 2003 and asked me to join him, I was excited.
Even
though my research tends to involve dinosaurs from the
Southern Hemisphere, this kind of discovery was too important
to pass
up.”
Excitement, however, wouldn’t be enough
to drive the project. Even with the approval of the Chinese
government,
the expedition required major funding. As was the case
during a previous dig in Egypt, where he and colleague
Josh Smith
unearthed the bones of one of the largest dinosaurs ever
found, Lamanna turned to the media for a healthy infusion
of cash.
After securing significant financial backing from
the Discovery Channel, Lamanna set out for China.
Collecting An Early Jackpot
Most times, paleontologists don’t expect to uncover a
mother lode of bones. In fact, they anticipate the opposite.
Still, Lamanna never imagined what would greet him when he
arrived in Changma.
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Paleontologists Hai-You and Matt Lamanna in the Changma
basin.
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“
There was a crew of eight to 10 Chinese helpers who found the
vast majority of fossils at the site,” says Lamanna. “By
the time we got there, they had already turned up this.”
“
This” is a slender, triangular chunk of brown mudstone
slightly larger than a slice of pie. Embedded in the rocky
sliver are what appear to be a couple of short, slightly gnarly
twigs. They are, of course, fossil bird bones neatly hidden
for millennia between thin layers of shale. At the site, Lamanna
immediately recognized what the workers showed him. The nearly
parallel, slightly raised impressions in the rock indicated
that fossils were just under the surface. To verify his gut
feeling, he and his colleagues sent the specimen to Beijing,
where a technician peeled back shaly layers to reveal a pair
of exquisitely preserved bird legs. At the time, Lamanna felt
he had hit the jackpot, not realizing even bigger payoffs were
yet to come.
“
At best, we were expecting to find a couple of birds, based
on the history of the site,” he says. “When we
got to Changma, and saw that the team had already found a bird,
I figured we had paid the bills. But it just kept getting better.”
If It Looks Like A Duck
As the field season wore on, workers on the site uncovered
fossils by the score. By the end of 2004, the expedition
had produced more than 40 fossil bird specimens, many of
them nearly complete and amazingly well preserved. Over the
next year, the count soared to almost 100. While the numbers
exceeded any imaginable expectations, the bones connected
to tell a compelling story on many levels, as well as providing
additional evidence to support the theory that modern-day
birds evolved from dinosaurs.
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Reconstruction of the Early Cretaceous amphibious
bird Gansus yumenensis.
illustration: Mark a. Klinger/CMNH |
To begin with, the fossils
represent a species—Gansus
yumenensis—that wasn’t quite a traditional dinosaur
and not exactly a direct ancestor of today’s birds
either. Dating to the early part of the Cretaceous Period,
these feathered
creatures might resemble at first glance any number of ducks
swimming in the rivers and lakes around Pittsburgh. Some
specimens even preserve remnants of webbing between the toes,
indicating
that the birds could propel themselves and dive in water,
just like a duck. A closer look, however, reveals that Gansus is
no common mallard.
For instance, it is small, maybe no more
than a foot across from wing to wing. Further inspection
of those little bones
shows structures long missing from current birds — a
pair of claws on each wing. The skeletal structure also
provides evidence that it was a good flyer, but not as
adept as modern
birds. As Lamanna points out, Gansus is Model-T
compared to its living relatives. Still, this primitive
bird is yielding
an abundance of information, thanks to near-perfect environmental
surroundings that helped preserve its fossils through the
ages.
“
The conditions in the area are special,” says Lamanna. “When
the birds died, they sank to the bottom of an ancient lake.
Along with weaker currents than you’d find in a river,
the lake may have not had much oxygen at its bottom, which
means there weren’t scavengers down there to eat
the birds. Over time, sediment covered them and preserved
them
in the condition we found them.”
After Gansus died
out, eons passed. The lake dried up. More rocks were
laid down, further protecting the fossils.
Then,
beginning about 70 million years ago, the Indian sub-continent
smashed into southern Asia, causing a violent, relentless
grinding collision that thrust once low-laying lands
upwards to form
the Himalaya Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. Over
time, the parched lakebed eroded, and its fossils were
driven
closer to the surface. Today, the barren, brownish landscape
bears
little resemblance to the once lush wetlands, which makes
fossil hunting an easier task. With finds becoming nearly
commonplace,
the surplus of specimens will allow Lamanna and others
to probe more deeply into Gansus and the world it inhabited.
A nearly complete fossil skeleton
of Gansus yumenensis shown at actual size. Feathers are
preserved adjacent to
the wing at left. Photo: hai-lu you/cags
A Lost World Revisited
Sometimes, a window on the past is as easy to open as turning
the pages of a history book. Understanding the life and times
of dinosaurs, however, proves more difficult. The reality
is that solving the puzzle of how these prehistoric flyers
lived is a matter of studying what remains long after their
deaths.
“
Fossils are the only direct evidence of large-scale evolutionary
processes,” says Lamanna. “That story can’t
be told in detail without additional discoveries and new
studies of existing specimens. Because we have so many Gansus specimens,
we already know a lot about it. And the additional specimens
will allow us to determine further aspects of Gansus’ biology,
such as how males and females might have differed, how their
populations were structured, how fast they grew to adulthood.
All this is unknown now. But with so many Gansus bones available,
we can start slicing into them to find what answers may be
inside.”
Along with Gansus and other extinct birds,
the expedition yielded beautifully preserved fossils of
plants, fishes,
turtles, a
salamander, and even insects with traces of their original
color patterns. These finds will help paleontologists accurately
recreate the world Gansus lived in—a skill at which
Lamanna excels.
“
Matt is gifted in the sense that he’s able to contextualize
fossils,” says Chris Beard, Carnegie Museum of Natural
History curator of vertebrate paleontology and section
head. “You
can train almost anyone to learn how to find fossils. But
beyond that skill is the ability to address questions in
new ways.
Matt has the ability to put a single fossilized specimen
in the big picture and offer new insight on how dinosaurs
evolved
and how life on Earth changed through time.”
That
talent also will help Lamanna in his role as lead scientific
advisor on Dinosaurs in Their World, the Museum
of Natural
History’s stunning exhibit that will nearly triple
the size of the former Dinosaur Hall. When unveiled late
next fall,
Dinosaurs in Their World will range over 25,552 square
feet, enough space to display over 15 mounted dinosaur
skeletons
and more than 200 other ancient plants and animals in a
way that captures them in their habitat as never before.
“
Visitors are going to see newly restored, much more dynamic
and scientifically accurate dinosaurs,” says Lamanna. “We’re
sweating the details. Not only are we grouping our dinosaurs
into their proper time periods, we’re recreating the
ecosystems they inhabited, too. When visitors walk through
the exhibition, they’re going to feel as though they’re
actually walking through the same environments the dinosaurs
lived in. The only thing missing will be the meat on their
bones.”
The Best is Yet to Come
As of May 2006, the number of identified dinosaurs stood at
527. That total represents a mere drop in the paleontological
bucket, says Peter Dodson, professor of anatomy at the University
of Pennsylvania’s school of veterinary medicine.
“
At the current rate of discovery of about 15 dinosaurs a
year, the number of dinosaurs that will be found in the
next 30 to
50 years should reach about 1,275,” says Dodson, who
instructed Lamanna at Penn.
To discover those dinosaurs in
waiting will require imagination and innovation, two words
that describe Lamanna.
“
No one works harder than Matt,” Dodson says. “He’s
followed his childhood dream to find fossils that will
grab people’s attention. His work so far is off the
charts.”
With Lamanna on board, the Museum of Natural
History stands poised to reinforce its reputation as one
of the world’s
leading contributors to dinosaur research and discoveries.
“
Matt is a perfect example of the type of scientist we want,” says
Beard. “He not only puts us on television when The Science
Channel makes a documentary, but he also helps to
advance our public programs, lectures and exhibitions.
I expect great things
from him far into the future.”
With Gansus and
Dinosaurs in Their World already near the top of a crowded
resume, Lamanna admits that the hunger
that led
him to the Museum of Natural History remains strong.
“I’d like to get more scientific publications out there,” he
says. “I’d like to establish a domestic field program to build the
museum’s collections from the Cretaceous and other periods of the Age of
Dinosaurs. And I already have a backlog of unstudied fossils that’ll last
me at least the next 10 years. So I’ve got my work cut out for me. But
this is my dream job.”
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