The Triangle

Issue date: 5/8/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Nathan Taylor Courtesy of Nathan Fried

Media Credit: Nathan Taylor Courtesy of Nathan Fried

If only those walking the corridors of 30th Street Station this past Monday knew what was underneath them, they might have decided to take a later train just to get one peak at the gigantic fossils being unloaded.

Kenneth Lacovara, assistant professor for the department of biology, has discovered the world's second most massive dinosaur, an achievement he has worked toward for the past five years in Patagonia, Argentina.

"Those bones represent the most complete super-massive dinosaur known, so we are pretty darn excited about this event," Lacovara said.

His team, including Drexel undergraduates, graduate students, and members of the Academy of Natural Sciences, has been digging up this dinosaur every winter since 2004. Years of hard work in the deserts of Patagonia finally paid off when the massive fossils arrived via container ship, docking at Packer Marine Terminal.

"When it finally got here to Philadelphia, I was awestruck," Jessica Battisto, a Drexel alumna, said. Battisto was part of Lacovara's excavation team as a Drexel undergraduate.

Alison Moyer, another Drexel alumna, participated in two of the five field seasons during her undergraduate years. She said working in the field is not "always as romantic as any childhood dreams."

"You have to filter your own water, get your own fire wood, sleep in a tent. We would only go into town every 14 to 16 days to refresh our supplies," Moyer said. "I actually had to celebrate my 19th birthday in the field."

During the excavation periods, Lacovara explained, he and his team had a rough daily routine. After rising at 6:30 a.m. each morning from sleeping on the ground in a cold tent, they would head out for the morning up a mountain toward the quarry, with only a few crackers for breakfast along the way. Lunch was tight, perhaps only a can of tuna, an apple or a piece of cheese, and dinner required going to the river to collect firewood to cook pieces of meat.

Lacovara said: "Work is essentially, you are breaking rock, or carrying buckets of rock. You do that until about noon. … Then you break some more rock. You do that until about seven or eight at night. When it starts getting dark, you sweep the quarry, Organize the tools and head back down the mountain to the camp. …

"By the time we clean up, its 10 or 11 at night and you climb back in your tent, try and get some sleep and do it again the next day at 6:30 in the morning. We do this seven days a week, two months at a time. But let me tell you, in the five years of running this project, I never heard one student complain."

Lacovara said the area in which he found the fossil-remains was just past the exact spot where Charles Darwin ended his exploration of the Patagonian plains in 1834 due to a shortage of food. If Darwin had not but one more loaf of bread to extend his stay, it might have been Darwin who would have discovered this creature.

"Lucky for me, he didn't," Lacovara said.

Previously considered to be distant evolutionary ancestors of modern day lizards, it has now become a scientific consensus that dinosaurs are more closely related to birds. An April 2007 study by John Asara and Mary Schweitzer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center revealed extracted T-Rex amino acids, which more so resembled that of modern day chickens than that of lizards.

Lacovara hopes to further the understanding of not just their phylogenic placement, but also many other facets of paleontological research.

"This really ends the data collection portion of the study. I'm not here today to report the scientific results. I'm here to report the beginning of the science," Lacovara said.

Lacovara said that new technology is replacing older methods of casting and examining fossils.

"We are going to scan this fossil with a laser so we have a 3-D model of it in a computer. We can assemble that model then in a virtual space and study the biomechanics of this organism," Lacovara said.

Through this process, Lacovara and his team will be able to use computer models to investigate methods of dinosaurian locomotion. Because this specimen is so complete and massive, his team has a very unprecedented window of opportunity to study much more biology of these super-massive creatures than ever before. Researchers hope to find ancient preserved tissues and cells which would lead to the understanding of scientific quandaries such as how dinosaurs might grow to such massive sizes in only the amount of time it takes a human to reach full maturity.

"Some paleontologists think that these beasts could attain this mass, 16 tons, in as short as 25 years," Lacovara said.

Because the dinosaur is on a four-year loan to the United States, the fossils will be shipped back and permanently curated in 2012 at a museum located in the Santa Cruz Province of Argentina.

"I'm not sure I could pull this project off at most other universities. Drexel is a place where you can come up with an idea and get it off the ground fast without much red tape," Lacovara said.

The public will be able to see Drexel students and professional bone preparers working on these fossils in Dinosaur Hall at the Academy of Natural Sciences and in the Paleo-Lab at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh beginning June 1.

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