The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs Read online

  Triceratops is a new type of dinosaur in our story. It belongs to a group of plant-eating ornithischians called ceratopsians, which descended from some of the small, fast-running, leaf-toothed critters like Heterodontosaurus and Lesothosaurus of the Early Jurassic. Beginning some time in the Jurassic, the ceratopsians went down their own evolutionary path. They switched from walking on their hind legs to plodding along on all fours and started to develop a wardrobe variety of horns and frills on their heads, which would get larger and gaudier as a hatchling turned into a hormone-fueled adult that needed to woo mates. The first ceratopsians were dog-size critters; one of them, Leptoceratops, straggled into the Late Cretaceous, where it lived alongside Triceratops, its much larger cousin. As ceratopsids got bigger over time—morphing into bovine versions of dinosaurs that were very common in North America during the latest Cretaceous—they changed their jaws so that they could engulf unholy quantities of plants. They packed their teeth closely together so that the jaws were essentially blades—four in all, one on each side of the upper jaw and one on each side of the lower. The jaws would snap shut in a simple up-and-down motion, the opposing blades slicing past each other like a guillotine. At the front of the snout was a razor-sharp beak, which would pluck the stems and leaves and deliver them to the blades. Triceratops surely was as good at eating plants as T. rex was at devouring meat.

  The skull of Triceratops, the iconic horned dinosaur.

  Photo courtesy of the author

  Finding a Triceratops was another coup for the Burpee Museum, exactly what it needed to accompany the teenage T. rex in the new exhibit space. From the moment Helmuth showed us the bones in the ground, I could tell that Mike and Scott were thinking exactly that. Helmuth too—and as the discoverer of the new dinosaur, he got to give it a nickname. Like me he is a big fan of The Simpsons, so he decided to call it Homer. One day, we surmised, Homer would join Jane in the halls of the Burpee Museum.

  A jumble of Triceratops bones at the Homer site, belonging to a pack of juveniles.

  Photo courtesy of the author

  My field notebook from the 2005 Burpee Museum expedition to Hell Creek, showing the field map of the Homer Triceratops site that I made.

  Photo courtesy of the author

  But first we had to get Homer out of the ground. The crew began to wrap up the exposed bones in plaster bandages, to protect them during transport back to Rockford. Others were tasked with finding more bones. Thomas Carr—my absinthe-drinking, Goth-dressing friend who studies T. rex—was with us on the expedition and was part of this team. Clad in khaki (it was far too hot for his usual all-black getup) and sucking down Gatorade by the gallon (absinthe was more of an indoor pursuit), he attacked the mudstones with his rock hammer (which he nicknamed Warrior) and his pickaxe (Warlord), exposing a number of new Triceratops bones. As he and the others pulverized the hillside, more bones were jarred loose. Eventually the excavation site extended for some seven hundred square feet (sixty-four square meters), and yielded over 130 bones.

  It quickly became very complex, so Scott tasked me with making a map—a skill I had learned the previous month from Paul Sereno. I laid out a meter-by-meter grid of string attached to chisels pounded into the rock. Using the grid for reference, I sketched the location of each bone in my field notebook. On the adjacent page I identified each bone, assigned it a number, and made notes on its size and orientation. In this way, we began to make order from the chaos.

  The map and bone inventory revealed something peculiar. There were three copies of the same bone: three left nasals, the bone that makes up the front and side of the snout. Each Triceratops had only one left nasal, the same way it had only one head or one brain. Then it dawned on us: we had three Triceratopses: not only Homer, but Bart and Lisa too. Helmuth had found a Triceratops graveyard.

  It was the first time that anybody had found more than one Triceratops in the same place. Until Helmuth walked into that gully, we thought Triceratops was a solitary animal—and we were fairly confident, because Triceratops was so common, already known from hundreds of fossils found over a hundred years, each one a single individual, encountered on its own. But one discovery can change everything, and because of what Helmuth found, we now think that Triceratops was a pack species.

  It’s actually not too surprising, because there is ample evidence that close cousins of Triceratops—some of the other large, horned ceratopsian species living in other parts of North America during the final 20 million years of the Cretaceous—were social creatures that cohabited in big groups. One of these species, Centrosaurus, which lived in modern-day Alberta about 10 million years before Triceratops and had a giant horn rising from its nose, has also been found in a bone bed—not a modest bonebed like the Homer site, but one covering an area of nearly three hundred football fields and entombing more than a thousand individuals. Several other ceratopsians have also been found in mass graves, providing a wealth of circumstantial evidence that these big, slow, horned, plant-munching species were communal. It brings to mind an evocative image: these dinosaurs probably moved across Late Cretaceous western North America in vast herds, many thousands strong, rumbling the ground and kicking up clouds of dust as they plowed across the landscape, not much unlike the bison that would conquer the same plains many millions of years later.

  After we finished working the Homer site, we continued to prospect the miles of monotonous badlands around Ekalaka, trying to set out early in the morning to beat the worst of the heat. We found a lot of other dinosaur fossils—nothing as important as Homer, but clues from some of the other animals that shared the latest Cretaceous floodplains with Triceratops and T. rex. We discovered scores of teeth from smaller carnivores, including dromaeosaurid raptors of the Velociraptor mold, as well as the chompers of a pony-size animal called Troodon, a close relative of the raptors that had developed a taste for a more omnivorous diet. We also came across some foot bones of human-size omnivorous theropods called oviraptorosaurs—weird, toothless dinosaurs with flamboyant crests of bone atop their skulls and sharp beaks adapted to eat a whole variety of food, from nuts and shellfish to plants and small mammals and lizards. Other fossils pointed to two distinct types of herbivores: a fairly boring ornithischian called Thescelosaurus, about the size of a horse, and a slightly larger and much more interesting creature called Pachycephalosaurus, one of the “dome-headed” dinosaurs with a bowling-ball skull that it used to batter its rivals in fights over mates and territory.

  We also spent a couple of days excavating at another locality, which we hoped would turn out to be as productive as the Homer site. It didn’t live up to our expectations, but it did produce bones of what is the third most common dinosaur in the Hell Creek formation: another plant-eater called Edmontosaurus. At about seven tons in weight and forty feet (twelve meters) from snout to tail, Edmontosaurus was a big herbivore like Triceratops but of a very different breed. It was a hadrosaur, a member of the duck-billed clan of dinosaurs that evolved from a separate branch of the ornithischian family tree. They were also very common in the Late Cretaceous—particularly in North America—and many of them lived in herds, walking on either two or four legs depending on how fast they wanted to move, and communicating with bellowing sounds produced by the convoluted spaghetti-twisted nasal chambers within their elaborate head crests. Their nickname comes from the broad, toothless, ducklike bill at the front of their snout, which they used to snare twigs and leaves. Like ceratopsians, their jaws were modified into scissors for slicing—but with even more, and more tightly packed, teeth. Nor were their jaws limited to simple up-and-down movements, but they could pivot from side to side and even hinge outward a little bit, allowing for complex chewing motions. They were some of the most intricate feeding machines ever produced by evolution.

  Pachycephalosaurus, the dome-headed, head-butting dinosaur from Hell Creek.

  Photo courtesy of the author

  The hadrosaurs, and probably also the ceratopsians, had these sophisticated ja
ws for a reason. They were fine-tuned by evolution to feed on a new type of plant that had arisen earlier in the Cretaceous: the angiosperms, more commonly known as the flowering plants. Although flowering plants are exceedingly abundant today—the source of much of our food, the décor in many of our gardens—they would have been unknown to the first dinosaurs rising up on Pangea in the Triassic. They were likewise unfamiliar to the giant long-necked sauropods of the Jurassic, which instead inhaled other types of vegetation like ferns, cycads, ginkgos, and evergreen trees. Then, about 125 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous, small flowers emerged in Asia. With another 60 million years of evolution, these proto-angiosperms had diversified into a range of shrubs and trees, including palms and magnolias, that dotted the Late Cretaceous landscape and that were tasty fodder for the new types of herbivorous dinosaurs that could eat them. There may have even been a little bit of grass—a very specialized type of angiosperm—sprinkled on the ground, but proper grasslands would not develop until much later, many tens of millions of years after the dinosaurs cleared out.

  Hadrosaurs and ceratopsians eating flowers. Smaller ornithischians feeding on shrubs, the pachycephalosaurs head-butting each other in tests of dominance. Poodle-size raptors prowling for salamanders, lizards, even some of our early mammal relatives, all of which are known from Hell Creek fossils. A variety of omnivores—Troodon and the freakish oviraptorosaurs—picking up whatever scraps the more specialized meat-eaters and plant-eaters forgot about. Other dinosaurs I haven’t yet mentioned, like the speed-demon ornithomimosaurs, and the heavily armored Ankylosaurus, fighting for their own niches. Pterosaurs and primitive birds soaring overhead; crocodiles lurking offshore in the rivers and the lakes. Not a sauropod to be found, and the King—the great T. rex itself—ruling over all of it.

  This was the Late Cretaceous of North America, the final flourish of the dinosaurs before disaster struck. Because of the wealth of fossils discovered by everyone from Barnum Brown to the teams from the Burpee Museum, it is the single richest dinosaur ecosystem known to science during the entire Age of Dinosaurs anywhere in the world, our best picture of how a variety of dinosaurs lived together and fit together into one food chain.

  It was much the same story in Asia, where big tyrannosaurs like my Pinocchio rex reigned over communities of duckbills, domeheads, raptors, and theropod omnivores—due to the close physical proximity with North America that allowed regular exchange of species between the two continents.

  Meanwhile, south of the equator, things were much different.

  ALMOST SMACK IN the middle of Brazil is a gently rolling plateau that was once covered by woodland savannah but is now prime farming country. There people grow some of the same crops found in the fields that stretch between my hometown and the Burpee Museum—mostly corn and soybeans—but also more exotic things like sugarcane, eucalyptus, and a whole host of delicious but unfamiliar fruits. This area is called Goiás, and it’s a landlocked state of some six million residents, crisscrossed by lonely highways. The national capital, Brasília, is a few hours away, and the Amazon surges a thousand miles to the north. Few foreign tourists ever make it here.

  Goiás, however, holds many secrets. You wouldn’t know it from the mundane topography, but underneath the farms is a hidden landscape, one that was on the surface between 86 and 66 million years ago. It is a terrain of windblown deserts on the fringes of great river valleys, represented today by a thousand-foot-thick basement of rocks, the foundation for the corn and bean fields. These rocks were molded out of the sand dunes, rivers, and lakes of the Late Cretaceous, in what was then a great basin formed from the residual stresses of South America and Africa cracking apart. This basin was a haven for dinosaurs.

  The Cretaceous rocks of Goiás remain mostly buried, but they do poke up here and there, along roads or stream banks. The best place to see them, though, is in quarries, where heavy machinery has torn through the earth to expose the layers of sandstone and mudstone beneath. That’s where I found myself one day in early July 2016, the beginning of the austral winter but still hot and muggy, adorned with a hard hat to save my scalp from falling stone and shin guards up to my knees to protect against an even greater danger: snakes. I had been invited to Brazil by Roberto Candeiro, a professor at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, the main university in the state, and an expert on the dinosaurs of South America. I had excavated and studied a lot of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs in North America and Asia, but Roberto advised me to get a southern perspective. He didn’t mention snakes as part of the deal.

  A few years earlier, Roberto had started a new undergraduate geology program at his university’s palm-lined campus on the rapidly growing outskirts of Goiânia, the state capital. The bleached white of the lecture halls—whose corridors were open to the breezy subtropical air—contrasted with the dirt streets and aluminum-roofed shanties just a few miles away. Mopeds growled their way through traffic while old men chopped coconuts with machetes on the roadsides, and monkeys swung from the trees in the distance. The next time I return, many of these remnants of old Brazil will probably be gone.

  The excitement of the new course, on the sparkling campus in the biggest city around, attracted a number of keen students, some of whom were joining Roberto and me on the trip to the quarry. There was Andre, a vivacious, potbellied comedian going back to school after trying out many different careers—papaya grower, taxi driver, and years ago a ranch hand in charge of manually deseminating male, and artificially inseminating female, pigs on one of those big farms in the flatlands. Much younger was eighteen-year-old Camila, a short wisp of a woman whose stature belies her boundless energy and ferocity—she relieves stress by kickboxing in her spare time. And then Ramon, a tall, tanned heartbreaker who, with his skinny jeans and hair slicked over to one side, could have leaped right out of one of the Brazilian boy-band music videos that seemed to be playing on every restaurant television.

  The quarry we were gathered in was owned by a young guy whose family had been farming in central Brazil for generations. They mined the rock for fertilizer. It is a strange type of stone that looks like concrete, with pebbles of various shapes and sizes embedded within a white matrix. The white stuff is limestone; the pebbles are various rocks that were washed around by the raging rivers of latest Cretaceous Brazil. Among those pebbles are rare bones—dinosaur fossils. Maybe one out of every ten or twenty thousand of them is bone instead of boulder, but whatever bones you can find are treasure, because they are the remains of some of the last dinosaurs of South America, those species living around the same time as T. rex, Triceratops, and the Hell Creek gang up north.

  Roberto Candeiro searching for fossils in Goiás, Brazil.

  Photo courtesy of the author

  Alas, after many hours of searching, we didn’t find any bones in the quarry when I visited. We also didn’t get bitten by any snakes, so it was a rare day when I came home from the field empty-handed but happy. Later during the trip, we did find some bones in other places, but only fragments. There would be no new species this time—which is often the case when you’re exploring a new area, because finding totally new dinosaurs is a hard job, dependent on luck and circumstance. But Roberto has led many such field trips over the past decade, often taking along his motley crew of students, and they’ve found a lot of bones. Roberto keeps some of them in his lab in Goiânia, where I spent the remainder of my time in Brazil working with Roberto and another of his buddies, an oil-company geologist named Felipe Simbras, who studies dinosaurs as a hobby.

  When you look at the fossils shelved in Roberto’s lab, it’s striking to see no T. rex. No tyrannosaurs of any kind, in fact, are known from the latest Cretaceous of Brazil. Spend a day walking through the Hell Creek badlands in Montana, and you’ll probably find several T. rex teeth—they’re that common. But zilch in Brazil, or anywhere else in the southern half of the planet. Instead, Roberto has drawers of other types of carnivorous dinosaur teeth. Some of these belong to a group that we’ve al
ready met: the carcharodontosaurs, that clan of mighty meat-eaters that evolved from the allosaurs and terrorized much of the planet earlier in the Cretaceous. A few of them, like Carcharodontosaurus from Africa, which I studied with Paul Sereno, eventually reached sizes rivaling T. rex. Up north, the carcharodontosaurs came and went, ruling for tens of millions of years before ceding their crown to the tyrannosaurs in the middle Cretaceous. Down south they persisted to the very end of the Cretaceous, retaining their heavyweight title because there were no tyrannosaurs around to take it.

  Another type of tooth is commonly found in Brazil. They’re also sharp, serrated blades, so they must have come from the mouth of a carnivore, but they are usually a little smaller, more delicate. They belong to a different group of theropods called abelisaurids, an offshoot of fairly primitive Jurassic stock that found the southern continents ripe for the taking during the Cretaceous. A decent skeleton of one, called Pycnonemosaurus, was found one state over from Goiás, in Mato Grosso. The bones are fragmented but are thought to belong to an animal that was about thirty feet (nine meters) long and weighed a couple of tons.

  Even better skeletons of abelisaurids have been found farther south, in Argentina, while others have been discovered in Madagascar, Africa, and India. These more complete fossils—Carnotaurus, Majungasaurus, and Skorpiovenator among them—reveal abelisaurids as fierce animals, a little bit smaller than tyrannosaurs and carcharodontosaurs, but still at or near the top of the food chain. They had short, deep skulls, sometimes with stubby horns jutting out from near the eyes. The bones of the face and snout were encrusted with a rough, scarred texture, which probably supported a sheath made of keratin. They walked on two muscular legs like T. rex, but had even more pitiful arms. Although it was thirty feet (nine meters) long and 1.6 tons in weight, Carnotaurus had arms barely bigger than a kitchen spatula, which flopped around in a useless way, probably all but invisible if you were watching it go about its everyday business. Clearly the abelisaurids didn’t need their arms, relying on their jaws and their teeth for all of the dirty work.