DINOSAUR NAMED AFTER ALBERTA RANCHER
Alberta cattle rancher Roy Audet says he’s proud to have the world’s newest fossil species named after him — even if the Canadian scientists who unearthed it on his property just north of the Montana border have identified the long-extinct creature as a “bone-headed dinosaur.”
“Yeah, I’m getting quite a few jokes about that,” says the 65-year-old resident of Milk River, Alta. “But I consider it kind of an honour.”
The dog-sized, plant-eating dinosaur, which roamed the wilds of Cretaceous Canada before dying out 85 million years ago, has been formally designated Acrotholus audeti in recognition of its super-thick skull or “high dome” (Acrotholus), and the fact that it grazed its last meal on land that — a few eons later — would become part of the sprawling beef operation that has been in the Audet (audeti) family for more than a century.
“It’s mostly a river valley, so there’s a lot of formations exposed because of erosion over the last 10,000 years,” says Audet, whose grandfather staked out a 6,000-acre spread — now down to 3,000 — in 1900. “So there’s badlands, and that’s where they can have some chance of finding things.”
The team that found remains of the two-metre-long, 40-kilogram Acrotholus included Royal Ontario Museum paleontologist David Evans, Ottawa-born Michael Ryan — now curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History — and three University of Toronto graduate students: Ryan Schott, Caleb Brown and Derek Larson.
Their discovery, formally an- nounced on Tuesday, is detailed in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications.
Based on a well-preserved example of the creature’s dome-like head ornamentation found on Audet’s ranch in 2008 — along with another specimen unearthed nearby by ROM researchers 50 years ago, but never definitively identified — the new species is deemed a breakthrough find in the understanding of the diversity of small dinosaurs. Because the thick “skull caps” of “pachycephalosaur” species such as Acrotholus are more likely to survive as fossils than the fragile bones of other small dinosaurs, they are seen as important indicators of how numerous these diminutive species must have truly been — even if absent from the fossil record.
The bony features were used by the animals to attract mates and possibly to engage in head-butting battles with romantic rivals, the same way many mammals use horns or antlers today.
Significantly, Acrotholus is also described as the oldest bone-headed dinosaur ever discovered in North America, and possibly the world. One other related species recently excavated in Mongolia is believed to be close to the same age.
“Acrotholus provides a wealth of new information on the evolution of bone-headed dinosaurs. Although it is one of the earliest known members of this group, its thickened skull dome is surprisingly well-developed for its geological age,” Evans, the project leader, said in a summary of the study. “More importantly, the unique fossil record of these animals suggests that we are only beginning to understand the diversity of small-bodied plant-eating dinosaurs.”
Ryan, who is also affiliated with Carleton University and the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, paid tribute to Audet for recognizing the value of Alberta’s paleontological heritage and welcoming scientists onto his ranch, which is also part of a unique Prairie ecosystem constituting of the northernmost habitats for several rare and vulnerable North American plant and animal species.
The discovery “highlights the importance of landowners, like Roy Audet, who grant access to their land and allow scientifically important finds to be made,” Ryan stated in the study overview.
“Over the last 30 years, I’ve had all kinds of people wandering through for various reasons,” Audet told Postmedia News on Tuesday.
“It’s an odd area here, because we’re on the edge of different vegetation and animals’ extreme ranges, so we have endangered species,” notes Audet, referring to such fellow inhabitants of the ranch as the threatened western silvery minnow and spadefoot toad, as well as the rare-in-Canada yucca plant (or soapweed) and its symbiotic pollinator, the yucca moth.
“I always find it fun when somebody comes along from the scientific community, whether they’re looking at grass or bugs or whatever,” he said, acknowledging his pride in being immortalized in the new dinosaur’s name. “It was nice of them to think of me as being partly responsible for their find.”