The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs Page 13

  5

  The Tyrant Dinosaurs

  Qianzhousaurus

  Chapter Title art by Todd Marshall

  ONE SWELTERING SUMMER DAY IN 2010, a backhoe operator in the southeastern Chinese city of Ganzhou heard a loud crunch. He expected the worst. His crew was racing to finish an industrial park—a sprawling monotony of offices and warehouses of the sort that I’ve seen crop up all over China during the past decade. Any delay could be pricey. Maybe he had hit impenetrable bedrock, an old water main, or another nuisance that would stall the project.

  When the dirt and smoke cleared, however, he didn’t see any mangled pipes or wires. There was no bedrock in sight. Instead, something very different came into focus: fossilized bones, lots of them, some of them enormous.

  Construction halted. The workman didn’t have any advanced degrees or training in paleontology, but he realized his discovery was important. He knew it must be a dinosaur. His homeland had become the epicenter of new dinosaur discoveries, the place where about half of all new species are being found these days. So he called over his foreman, and that is when the madness began.

  This dinosaur had been buried for more than 66 million years, but now its fate was down to the kind of quick decisions that unfold during a crisis. Word started to leak out. In a panic, the foreman called a friend from town, a fossil collector and dinosaur enthusiast known to posterity only as Mr. Xie. Grasping the gravity of the discovery, Mr. Xie—his honorific and hazy surname recalling one of those shadowy characters in a Bond film—raced to the worksite and rang up some mates at the town’s mineral resources department, a branch of the local government. The game of telephone continued and the agency was able to round up a small team to gather the bones. It took them six hours, but they collected every scrap they could find. They filled twenty-five bags with dinosaur bits and took them to the town’s museum for safekeeping.

  Their timing was perfect—ominously so. Just as the team was finishing, three or four fossil traffickers appeared on the scene. Like bloodhounds, these black-market hucksters caught the scent of a new dinosaur and wanted to buy it for themselves. A little bit of bribe money would turn into a major payday if they sold the new dinosaur to some wealthy foreign businessman with a taste for exotic fossils. This kind of thing is all too common in China and in many other parts of the world (although it is often against the law). It is heartbreaking to think of the fossils that have been lost to the dark underworld of illegal dealing and organized crime. But this time, the good guys won.

  When scientists examined the fossils in the safety of the local museum and began to piece together the bones, they quickly recognized how incredible this new discovery was. It wasn’t just a jumble of random bones but a nearly complete skeleton of a predatory dinosaur, one of the massive, sharp-toothed behemoths that always seem to play the villain in films and television documentaries. And the skeleton looked similar to a famous dinosaur from halfway around the world: the great Tyrannosaurus rex, which stalked the forests of North America at about the same time that these red rocks from Ganzhou, which the backhoe operator was plowing through to lay his foundation, were formed.

  Then it clicked: they were looking at an Asian tyrannosaur. The ferocious ruler of a 66-million-year-old world of dense jungles, sticky with humidity all year round, with swamps and the occasional quicksand pit peppered in between the ferns, pines, and conifers. It was an ecosystem teeming with lizards, feathered omnivorous dinosaurs, sauropods, and swarms of duck-billed dinosaurs, some of which got caught in the slushy death pits and were preserved as fossils. The ones lucky enough to survive were tasty prey for the creature the workman stumbled upon by pure chance: one of the closest relatives of T. rex.

  THAT BLESSED WORKMAN. He had made a discovery of the sort most paleontologists dream of. Lucky for me, this was a finding that I got to be part of without having to do the hard work of hunting it myself.

  A few years after the craziness of that late summer day in Ganzhou, I was at a conference at the Burpee Museum of Natural History, in the frozen winter wasteland of northern Illinois, just up the road from where I grew up. Scientists from around the world had gathered to discuss the extinction of the dinosaurs. Earlier in the day, I was mesmerized by a presentation from Junchang Lü, my eyes opening wider with each slide, as photo after photo of beautiful new fossils from China flashed across the screen. I knew Professor Lü by reputation. He was widely regarded as one of China’s top dinosaur hunters, a man whose discoveries helped establish his country as the world’s most exciting place for dinosaur research.

  Professor Lü was a star. I was a young researcher, but to my great surprise Professor Lü approached me. I shook his hand and congratulated him on his talk, and we exchanged a few other pleasantries. But there was urgency in his voice, and I noticed he was clutching a folder thick with photos. Something was going on.

  Professor Lü told me he had been tasked with studying a spectacular new dinosaur found by a construction worker in southern China a few years before. He knew it was a tyrannosaur, but it seemed peculiar. It was different enough from T. rex that it must be a new species. And it looked kind of similar to a weird tyrannosaur that I had described a few years earlier as a graduate student—a slender, long-snouted predator from Mongolia called Alioramus. But Professor Lü wasn’t sure. He wanted a second opinion. Of course I offered to help in any way I could.

  Professor Lü, or Junchang, as I soon knew him, told me all about his past—how he grew up poor in Shandong Province, on China’s eastern coast, a child of the Cultural Revolution who staved off hunger by picking wild vegetables. Then, once the winds of politics changed, he studied geology in college, went to Texas to do his PhD, and came back to Beijing to take up one of the most vaunted jobs in Chinese paleontology, a professorship at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.

  Junchang—the peasant turned professor—became my friend. Not too long after we met at the conference, he invited me to China to help him study the new tyrannosaur and write up a scientific paper describing the skeleton. We scrutinized each part of the skeleton, comparing it to all other tyrannosaurs. We confirmed that it was a close cousin of T. rex. A little over a year later, in 2014, we unveiled the workman’s chance discovery as the newest member of the tyrannosaur family tree, a new species that we called Qianzhousaurus sinensis. The formal name is a something of a tongue twister, so we nicknamed it Pinocchio rex, in reference to its funny long snout. The press got wind of the discovery—journalists seemed to love the silly nickname—and Junchang and I were amused to see our faces splashed across the British tabloids the morning after our announcement.

  The facial bones of Alioramus altai, a new species of long-snouted tyrannosaur from Mongolia that I described as a PhD student.

  Photograph by Mick Ellison.

  Qianzhousaurus is part of a surge of new tyrannosaur discoveries over the past decade that is transforming our understanding of this most iconic group of meat-eating dinosaurs. T. rex itself has been in the limelight for over a century, since it was first discovered in the early 1900s. It’s the king of dinosaurs, a forty-foot-long, seven-ton behemoth on a first-name basis with almost everyone on the planet. Later during the twentieth century, scientists discovered a few close relatives of T. rex that were also impressively large and realized that these big predators formed their own branch of dinosaur genealogy, a group that we called the tyrannosaurs (or Tyrannosauroidea in formal scientific parlance). However, paleontologists struggled to understand when these fantastic dinosaurs originated, what they evolved from, and how they were able to grow so large and reach the top of the food chain. These questions have remained unanswered until now.

  Over the last fifteen years, researchers have recovered nearly twenty new tyrannosaur species at locations the world over. The dusty southern Chinese construction site that yielded Qianzhousaurus is one of the least unusual places where a new tyrannosaur has been found. Other new species have been pried from the sea-battered cliffs of southern
England, the frigid snowfields of the Arctic Circle, and the sandy expanses of the Gobi Desert. These finds have allowed my colleagues and me to build a family tree of tyrannosaurs in order to study their evolution.

  The results are surprising.

  It turns out that tyrannosaurs were an ancient group that originated more than 100 million years before T. rex, during those golden days of the Middle Jurassic when dinosaurs were beginning to prosper and long-necked sauropods, like the creatures whose footprints we found in that ancient Scottish lagoon, were rumbling across the land. These first tyrannosaurs weren’t very impressive. They were marginal, human-size carnivores. They continued this way for another 80 million years or so, living in the shadows of larger predators, first Allosaurus and its kin in the Jurassic, and then the fierce carcharodontosaurs in the Early to middle part of the Cretaceous. Only then, after that interminable period of evolution in anonymity, did tyrannosaurs start growing bigger, stronger, and meaner. They reached the top of the food chain and ruled the world during the final 20 million years of the Age of Dinosaurs.

  THE STORY OF tyrannosaurs begins with the discovery of T. rex, the namesake of the group, in the early days of the twentieth century. The scientist who studied T. rex was a good friend of President Theodore Roosevelt’s, a boyhood chum who shared Teddy’s love for nature and exploration. His name was Henry Fairfield Osborn, and during the early 1900s, he was one of the most visible scientists in the United States.

  Osborn was president of New York’s American Museum of Natural History and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1928 he even graced the cover of Time magazine. But Osborn was no normal man of science. His blood ran blue: his father was a railroad tycoon, his uncle the corporate raider J. P. Morgan. He seemed to be a member of every wood-paneled, smoke-filled, good-old-boy backroom club there was. When he wasn’t measuring fossil bones, he was rubbing shoulders with New York’s social elite in the penthouses of the Upper East Side.

  Osborn is not remembered very fondly today. He wasn’t a very nice man. He used his wealth and political connections to push pet ideas on eugenics and racial superiority. Immigrants, minorities, and the poor were seen as enemies. Once Osborn even organized a scientific expedition to Asia with the hope of finding the very oldest human fossils, to prove that his species couldn’t possibly have originated in Africa. He couldn’t fathom being the evolutionary descendent of an “inferior” race. No wonder he is often dismissed today as just another bygone bigot.

  Osborn is probably not the type of guy I would want to have a beer—or more likely, a really fancy cocktail—with if I found myself in Gilded Age New York. (I speculate, but he might not have sat down with me anyway, leery of my very ethnic-sounding Italian name.) Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Osborn was a clever paleontologist and an even better scientific administrator. It was in his capacity as president of the American Museum of Natural History—the august institution that rises like a cathedral on the west side of Central Park, where I would later work on my PhD—that Osborn made one of the best calls in his career. He decided to send a sharp-eyed fossil collector named Barnum Brown out to the American West in search of dinosaurs.

  We briefly met Brown in the last chapter, when a much older version of him was excavating Jurassic dinosaurs in the Howe Quarry in Wyoming. He was an unlikely hero. He grew up in a speck of a village on the Kansas prairie, a coal-company town where only a few hundred people lived. Maybe his parents gave him a flamboyant name inspired by the circus showman P. T. Barnum in some attempt to escape the drudgery of their rural life. The young Barnum didn’t have many people around to talk to, but he was surrounded by nature, and he became infatuated with rocks and shells. He even started a little museum at his house, something my dinosaur-obsessed younger brother, also growing up in a placid Midwestern town, would later do after seeing Jurassic Park in the cinema. Brown went on to study geology in college and then made his way from the small time to New York City in his twenties. It was there he met Osborn and was hired as a field assistant, tasked with bringing huge dinosaurs from the unexamined expanses of Montana and the Dakotas to the bright lights of Manhattan, where socialites who had never slept a night outdoors could gawk at the stupendousness of it all.

  Barnum Brown (left) and Henry Fairfield Osborn digging up dinosaur bones in Wyoming, 1897.

  AMNH Library.

  This is how Brown found himself, in 1902, in the desolate badlands of eastern Montana. While out prospecting the hills, Brown came across a jumble of bones. Part of a skull and jaw, some vertebrae and ribs, bits of the shoulder and arm, and most of the pelvis. The bones were enormous. The size of the pelvis indicated an animal that stood several meters tall, certainly much larger than a human. And they were clearly the remains of a muscular creature that could run relatively fast on two legs—the characteristic body type of a meat-eating dinosaur. Other predatory dinosaurs had been found before—like Allosaurus, the Butcher of the Late Jurassic—but none of these were anywhere near the colossal size of Brown’s new beast. He was on the cusp of turning thirty years old, and he had made a discovery that would define him for the rest of his life.

  Brown sent his discovery back to New York, where Osborn was anxiously awaiting the shipment. The bones were so big, they took years to clean up and assemble into a partial skeleton that could be exhibited to the public. This work was mostly done by the end of 1905, when Osborn announced the new dinosaur to the world. He published a formal scientific paper designating the new dinosaur as Tyrannosaurus rex—a beautiful combination of Greek and Latin that means “tyrant lizard king”—and put the bones on display at the American Museum, as the institution is known among scientists. The new dinosaur became a sensation, making headlines throughout the country. The New York Times celebrated it as “the most formidable fighting animal” that had ever existed. Crowds flocked to the museum, and when they came face-to-face with the tyrant king, they were aghast at its monstrous size and dumbfounded by its ancient age, then estimated at some 8 million years old (we now know that it is much older, about 66 million years old). T. rex had become a celebrity, and so had Barnum Brown.

  Brown will always be remembered as the man who discovered Tyrannosaurus rex, but this was just the start of his career. He developed such an eye for fossils that he steadily progressed from a fossil-collecting grunt worker to the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum, the scientist in charge of the world’s finest dinosaur collection. Today, if you visit its spectacular dinosaur halls, many of the fossils you’ll see were collected by Brown and his teams. No wonder that Lowell Dingus, one of my former colleagues in New York who wrote a biography of Brown, refers to him as “the best dinosaur collector who ever lived.” This sentiment is shared by many of my fellow paleontologists.

  Brown was the first celebrity paleontologist, acclaimed for his lively lectures and a weekly CBS radio show. People would flock to see him as he passed through the American West on trains, and later in his life he helped Walt Disney design the dinosaurs in Fantasia. Like any good celebrity, Brown was an eccentric. He hunted fossils in the dead of summer in a full-length fur coat, made extra cash spying for governments and oil companies, and had such a fondness for the ladies that rumors of his tangled web of offspring are still whispered throughout the western American plains. You can’t help but think that if Brown were alive today, he would be the star of some outrageous reality show. And probably a politician.

  A few years after T. rex stormed New York, Brown was back at it, in his fur coat, scrambling over the badlands of Montana, looking for more fossils. As usual, he found them. This time it was a much better Tyrannosaurus: a more complete skeleton with a gorgeous skull, nearly as long as a man and with over fifty sharp teeth the size of railroad spikes. While Brown’s first T. rex was too scrappy to make a good estimate for the total size of the animal, the second fossil showed that rex was a king indeed: a dinosaur well over thirty-five feet long that must have weighed several tons. There was
no doubt: T. rex was the largest and most fearsome land-living predator that had ever been discovered.

  FOR THE NEXT few decades, T. rex enjoyed life at the top, the star of movies and museum exhibits around the globe. It battled the giant gorilla in King Kong and terrified audiences in the screen adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. But this fame masked a puzzle: for nearly the entire twentieth century, scientists had little idea of how T. rex fit into the broader picture of dinosaur evolution. It was an oddball, a creature so much larger and so dramatically different from other known predatory dinosaurs that it was difficult to place in the dinosaur family album.

  During the first few decades after Brown’s discovery, paleontologists unearthed a handful of close T. rex relatives in North America and Asia. To nobody’s surprise, Brown himself made some of the most important of these discoveries, most notably a mass graveyard of big tyrannosaurs in Alberta in 1910. These T. rex cousins—Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Tarbosaurus—are quite similar to T. rex in size and have nearly identical skeletons. As the science of dating rocks advanced during the later twentieth century, it was also determined these other tyrannosaurs lived at about the same time as T. rex: the very latest Cretaceous, between 84 and 66 million years ago. So scientists were in a quandary. There were a bunch of huge tyrannosaurs at the top of the food chain thriving at the peak of dinosaur history. Where did they come from?

  That mystery has been answered only very recently, and as with so much of what we’ve learned about dinosaurs over the last few decades, our new understanding of tyrannosaur evolution stems from a wealth of new fossils. Many of these have come from unexpected locales, perhaps none more so than what is currently recognized as the very oldest tyrannosaur, a modest little critter called Kileskus that was discovered in 2010 in Siberia. When you think of dinosaurs, Siberia is probably not a place that comes to mind, but their fossils are now being found throughout the world, even the far northern reaches of Russia, where paleontologists need to cope with harsh winters and humid, mosquito-infested summers.