For two weeks this summer, a team of students trekked through the sun-baked scrub of Wyoming alongside University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, carefully scanning sandstone for the ruddy smudges that can signal a fragment of dinosaur bone.
It didn’t matter that the rest of teen America whiled away that part of July at local malls and back-yard swimming pools. Carol Gudanowski, 19, found a Tyrannosaurus Rex claw on the ground and yelped for joy. Thomas Dinkel, 17, clung to a spire of sandstone and chiseled out a shard of dinosaur shoulder blade.
And by far the biggest find: The team helped Sereno return to the university the fossil of a 15- to 20-foot-long predatory dinosaur–possibly a previously undiscovered tyrannosaur and smaller relative of T. Rex–embedded in a 2-ton boulder.
It was all enough to cinch it for Dinkel. The Northwest Sider’s future will include a career in paleontology.
“I’ve decided I actually want to do this,” said Dinkel, who attends Loyola Academy in Wilmette. “This made me decide what I want to do when I grow up.”
Sereno and three of his students appeared at his University of Chicago basement laboratory Sunday to discuss the expedition’s results, the most significant of which was unearthing fossils of the predatory dinosaur.
Found on a ranch about 200 miles north of Cheyenne, Wyo., the fossils had been known since the 1950s, but up to now scientists believed they once belonged to a duck-billed dinosaur.
But as Sereno and his students carefully chiseled away the rock encasing the fossils, it became evident the bones came from a predatory dinosaur, but more laboratory work needs to be done before Sereno can determine if the fossils represent a new find.
“It was left for five decades weathering on the top of a hill until we came with the class, pored over it, and began to understand what actually was locked in the rock was not just a predatory dinosaur, but maybe a new one,” Sereno said.
He said the fossils are also important because, in places, the impression of the dinosaur’s skin pattern appears to have been preserved.
“We’re still perplexed by that surface because we’re wondering whether it was covered by feathers, as it’s clear some of its very close relatives are, or whether it had scales like we know other plant-eating dinosaurs have. The jury is still out,” Sereno said.
The expedition capped a busy 12 months for Sereno that included treks to Africa, India and the Gobi Desert and produced about 40 tons of fossils. He plans to return to the Gobi next year, where he has found a herd of dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous Period that perished together in a swamp.
“When you find a site like that it’s a rare, rare site,” Sereno said.
Chicago’s newest paleontology star, Field Museum dinosaur expert Peter Mackovicky, returned from the Gobi last year with a well-preserved skull of a Gallimimus, a toothless, beaked dinosaur thought to filter food through a sievelike mouth, much like a duck does.
For the U. of C. undergraduate students and high school students from across the country who comprised the Sereno team, just as important were the fossils they found on their own.
On the second week of the expedition, Marco Mendez, 16, of the South Side helped dig out a well-preserved carapace of a prehistoric turtle. Nearby he found the hip bone and skull of a plant-eating dinosaur.
“This year in Wyoming, I got to learn the real stuff that makes up paleontology,” Mendez said. “Now I’m learning how to make family trees, how to identify fossils, how to tell how the geologic formations were laid down.”
