Dino Gangs: Dr Philip J Currie’s New Science of Dinosaurs. Josh Young

Alberta is an animal called Daspletosaurus, and Currie says that it appears that the Daspletosaurus is probably the direct ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, and possibly also of Tarbosaurus.

      ‘One of my very first discoveries of a tyrannosaur was a specimen of Daspletosaurus,’ Currie remembers. ‘I had been walking around the badlands in Dinosaur Provincial Park in southern Alberta when I stopped to take a picture of the panorama of badlands, and my camera case fell off and rolled down the hill. I went down the hill to pick up my camera case and was very shocked to see that it had landed on a skull of Daspletosaurus – though I didn’t know that at the time. But a couple of years later we had excavated the whole skeleton and I realized that it was, in fact, Daspletosaurus.’

      Looking for bones requires extreme focus. Currie says that generally when he arrives at a new site, he finds that it can actually be difficult to locate dinosaur bones at first. He believes the reason is that he has a search image that develops over time. Basically, this image allows him to think about other things when he’s searching for dinosaur bones.

      ‘You can walk along and think about your last supper or your dream the night before, but as soon as you see a dinosaur bone – bang – your whole attention gets focused on that,’ he explains. ‘And so the search images are a very important aspect of hunting for dinosaur bones. Now when you go to a different region, the trouble is that the bones are in a different kind of rock; they can have a different colour, and different textures. You generally find that until you discover your first specimen, you haven’t got that search image developed, and so you can walk right over a good dinosaur specimen because you’re not really looking for that; you’re looking for something from another part of the world at a different locality. Generally, of course, if you’ve been hunting these specimens for a long time, it takes less time for you to switch from area to area, but there is this problem with search image for sure.’

      Even for experienced palaeontologists, finding dinosaurs requires a combination of science and serendipity. ‘Some people are lucky and some people aren’t,’ Currie says. ‘Generally what it comes down to is you have to be the right person in the right place at the right time. If my camera case hadn’t rolled down and I didn’t know what one of those specimens looked like, then I wouldn’t have seen it. So if you put yourself in the right situation, right time, right place, and you know what you’re looking for, you are going to find these things. But there is always a certain amount of luck.’

      Dino hunters draw on the work of their fellow palaeontologists. It’s a small community, and although it is very competitive – sometimes bordering on the cut-throat – Currie refers to fellow palaeontologists as his ‘colleagues’ even though they generally work independently. For him, working together is essential because the subject matter is so dauntingly vast.

      ‘Sometimes it is a matter of finding animals that washed in from a different environment 65 million years ago; or maybe a new species represents an animal that was just not very common in that particular area in the Cretaceous, and therefore it didn’t fossilize very commonly; in other cases it is simply because the environments that they lived in just aren’t represented.’

      In 2006, Yuong-Nam Lee, a Korean herbivorous dinosaur specialist and expert dinosaur hunter, was able to put together financing for the Korea– Mongolia International Dinosaur Project, a five-year expedition in the Gobi Desert. He has been studying dinosaurs for 15 years, and serves as Principal Researcher (and now Director) at the Korea Institute of Geoscience & Mineral Resources in South Korea. He had hoped to work with Currie on an extensive expedition for a long time. ‘Dr Philip Currie is a famous dinosaur person all over the world,’ Yuong-Nam explains. ‘His knowledge is incredibly huge, so I learn many things from him.’

      He and Currie would be joined by a group of scientists that they had known and worked with in the past. Each had their own area of expertise and working together would allow them to pool their resources. Yuong-Nam’s close friend Yoshi Kobayashi is Japan’s number one dino man and an expert on theropods – meat-eating dinosaurs. Yoshi has been working in the Gobi since 1996.

      Louis Jacobs, Professor of Earth Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, served as PhD advisor to both Yuong-Nam and Yoshi. Jacobs studies vertebrate fossils to determine what they tell us about the history of the Earth and the history of life. He tries to go to places where that record can be improved and where there’s a chance of making breakthrough discoveries and putting them into context so we can learn more about past life on the Earth.

      ‘The main reason I like doing [fieldwork] is because that’s where you find fossils, and palaeontologists have to have fossils,’ Jacobs says. ‘It’s very much like a different world being there, but it really was a different world at the time those dinosaurs lived, completely separated by a distance of time. And the only way that you bridge that gap in time, that huge barrier, is to understand what happens each step of the way for the last 70 million years. It’s uncanny when you think about it, that you even go to a place like [the Gobi Desert] and find the kinds of fossils you do, and ask the sorts of questions that you can ask, and understand it in terms of what the world is like today. But it’s those general principles that will allow us to really understand the Earth, and that’s important for humans to know.’

      Dave Eberth, a Canadian sedimentologist and habitat specialist also joined the expedition. Eberth is a senior research scientist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and is basically a geologist who works with fossils. He is able to look at how rock formations came together millions of years ago, and then use his knowledge to create a bigger picture of what life was like at the time.

      Currie met Eberth at a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference. He was so impressed that he hired Eberth to work at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. The two have a feisty rapport. Indeed, Eberth has often said he is sceptical of Currie’s theories about dinosaur behaviour. ‘Anything I say, he objects to; anything he says, I object to,’ Currie says. In their case it’s not totally contentious; it pushes each other to solidify their theories and move the scientific dialogue forward.