A Decade of Discoveries for 10 Years of Dino Fest
To mark 10 years of Dino Fest, we're looking back at 10 of the colossal discoveries by NHM researchers from the Age of Dinosaurs
It’s beginning to look a lot like Dino Fest—for the tenth time! To celebrate the momentous anniversary, we’re looking back at a decade of discoveries from the Mesozoic—the period from about 252 to 66 million years ago, when dinosaurs evolved and then came to rule the planet.
"This Dino Fest is special because it also represents my 10th year with NHM and the Dinosaur Institute,” says Dr. Nate Smith, Gretchen Augustyn Director and Curator of NHM’s Dinosaur Institute. “I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together, and so happy to see this annual festival become part of the fabric of NHM and the L.A. community!"
"This year also marks the 20th anniversary of the Dinosaur Institute, and in that time we've built an award-winning Dinosaur Hall, and created an international hub for dinosaur research and collections that continues to yield new knowledge and discoveries,” says Dr. Luis Chiappe, Senior Vice President of Research and Collections and Curator of the Dinosaur Institute at NHM.
In NHM’s Dino Lab, you can see preparators cleaning fossils excavated from digs for display and study, but that’s just one stop on a fossil’s journey to the collections, where they can be studied by researchers at NHM and across the globe. Every fossil opens a new window into the Age of Dinosaurs, and collectively, they offer an ever clearer view of the Earth dinosaurs ruled over. As novel technologies are applied to the study of fossils, researchers are increasingly able to ask new kinds of questions by leveraging new ways to explore even bigger pictures of the ancient past. From new species to biodiversity and climate science, below are some of the coolest and most impactful discoveries from the Age of Dinosaurs over the past ten years.
Birds are dinosaurs, and a recent discovery of a new bird species from the Mesozoic by Dr. Chiappe and his colleagues helped us understand bird brain evolution during the late history of dinosaurs (think of birds being a late chapter in the saga of dinosaur evolution!). The exceptionally rare fossil skull of a new bird species, Navaornis hestia, from the Age of Dinosaurs revealed that in one extinct major group of ancient birds, their skulls achieved a recognizably modern shape using archaic structures—an unexpected but stunning example of convergent evolution—while also unearthing a missing link in the long evolutionary history of the bird brain.
Illustration by Stephanie Abramowicz
Earth’s first giant, Cymbospondylus youngorum—a huge ichthyosaur described by NHM’s Vertebrate Paleontology Curator, Dr. Jorge Velez-Juarbe. Along with an international team of researchers, Velez-Juarbe used the finding to better understand how and why modern whales—a very distantly related group of giants—got so massive. The fossil skull was spectacular, and the research findings it helped enable scientists to make were equally humongous.
Described by Dr. Smith, the surprising discovery of a new species of extinct crocodile relative, Benggwigwishingasuchus eremicarminis (Benji for short) revealed that while giant ichthyosaurs ruled the oceans, the ancient crocodile kin known as pseudosuchian archosaurs ruled the shores across the Middle Triassic globe between 247 and 237 million years ago.
Image by Stephanie Abramowicz, Dinosaur Institute, NHMLAC.
Pterosaurs’ delicate, hollow bones make their origins particularly difficult to elucidate from the fossil record, but Dr. Smith discovered a missing piece in their evolutionary journey to flight at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. The enigmatic Dromomeron and other lagerpetids are the closest relatives of pterosaurs, solving one part of their mysterious origin while pointing to how the unique pterosaur body plan might have been assembled.
There are monstrous discoveries waiting in some of the smaller, more fragmented specimens in museum collections, like lizards. Dinosaur Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Hank Woolley’s discovery of a raccoon-sized armored monstersaurian lizard revealed a surprising diversity of these large lizards at the pinnacle of the Age of Dinosaurs. Named for the goblin prince from The Hobbit, the new species, Bolg amondol, also illuminated the sometimes murky path that life traveled between continents in the world of dinosaurs.
For a long time, the public imagination held that dinosaurs died off because they were slow and stupid—an evolutionary dead end. The same mistaken belief hounded the mysterious shelled ammonoids that shared their Mesozoic seas, but a study by Dr. Austin Hendy, NHM’s Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology, leveraged innovative digitized collections to show that these animals were also diverse—up to the point that a fateful meteor cratered the non-avian dinosaurs and ammonites.
Wild swings in climate and a lack of consistently abundant vegetation prevented large plant-eating dinosaurs from dominating tropical regions near the equator for up to 30 million years after they first evolved. The multi-year, multi-institutional research study from Dr. Smith and his colleagues pieced together a detailed picture of the climate and ecology during the rise of the dinosaurs 212 million years ago, answering a persistent mystery: why only a few small-bodied meat-eating dinosaurs gained a foothold in the tropics during the Late Triassic.
Sometimes, new discoveries are hiding in old specimens. Years after bones of a duck-billed dinosaur were collected in the 1930s, Dr. Chiappe and other researchers determined they belonged to a new species, which they dubbed Augustynolophus morrisi. Affectionately called Auggie, it went on to become California's official state dinosaur, holding a special place in our hearts, and in the Mezzanine of the Dinosaur Hall, which is the only place on planet Earth this dinosaur can be seen.
We’re in the golden age of dinosaurs. The title might be contested, but the fact that researchers discover a new species of dinosaur basically weekly means that we have a better grasp of their diversity now than ever before. Dr. Smith and his colleagues’ discovery of giant carcharodontosaur Meraxes gigas from the Cretaceous of Patagonia added a new monster to the pantheon and helped us better understand how predators like T. rex and Meraxes (and Carnotaurus), to name a few, all evolved those massive heads and teeny arms.
See Gnatalie, the world’s first green-hued 75-foot long-necked dinosaur mount, discovered and excavated by Museum scientists.
One of NHM’s most momentous dinosaur discoveries has been on display for almost a year now. Discovered in Southeast Utah on a Dinosaur Institute dig led by Dr. Chiappe, Gnatalie’s story also reflects the community of students, volunteers, and researchers that make excavating and displaying gargantuan finds possible. While it welcomes guests in NHM Commons, researchers think that the green-boned beauty we call Gnatalie also represents a new species of long-necked dinosaur.
