Paleontologist sets off on a hunt for dinosaur skeletons in USA
In his most recent trip, in August, Dr Manning is guiding a team to assess the possibility for digging out one of these dinosaurs from its rocky tomb.
The innovative paleontologist and his crew are notable for their study on the hadrosaur Dinomummy, helping dinosaurs ‘virtually’ walk, zapping Archaeopteryx with particle accelerators and pursuing the enigmatic T. rex in the Badlands of Montana.
Badlands is a huge swathes of arid, infertile terrain not fit for farming or development.
The isolated Hell Creek Formation presents as the most favorable sites for the exploration of Late Cretaceous dinosaur remnants in the world.
This is the final portion of geological time that consists of the fossil remnants of dinosaurs, before their mass extinction. Dr Manning, from The University of Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, is convinced that one of the Triceratops will be perfect for their research program.
He said: “We have been working on the exceptional preservation of soft tissue and the biomechanics of dinosaurs from the Hell Creek for over five years now, but this is our first major Manchester-led expedition to this very promising field area.”
A cast of Stan the T. Rex already sits in the Manchester Museum, constructed by a museum crew and Dr Manning five years ago.This dreadful predator from the Hell Creek Formation is also well-known to the locality where Dr Manning and his team are researching on the Triceratops.
He said: “It’s great that we have a chance to look at one of the prey animals of the mighty T. rex – who knows what we might find associated with the bones of this magnificent creature from the Cretaceous, maybe a predator tooth or three?”
The research crew which comprises Dr William Sellers from The University of Manchester and a group of co-workers from the University of Pennsylvania and other organizations in Philadelphia, hope to find immaculate remains of dinosaurs this year in this very inaccessible landscape.Dr Sellers, who studies dinosaur locomotion at Manchester’s Faculty of Life Sciences, added: “The bones of Triceratops will make a perfect large quadrupedal dinosaur model to study dinosaur locomotion.
“We have already published on the maximum running speed of predators and even hadrosaurs, but Triceratops are just wonderful creatures to behold. Many have compared them to rhinoceros, but our work indicates these animals moved quite differently from these modern herbivores”.
The fieldwork is part of a continuing research program between The University of Manchester and The University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University and the Museum of Prehistoric Life in Price (Utah). The exploration has been backed by sources external to the United Kingdom.Dr Manning is the head of the paleontology research group at The University of Manchester and a research fellow at the Manchester Museum.
He said: “I have always believed that classic approaches in palaeontology are unable to resolve many key biological questions about extinct vertebrates.
“We have used techniques as diverse as evolutionary robotics, high-performance computing, finite element modelling, LiDAR, high-resolution x-ray tomography, nanoindentation, as well as recently published work using synchrotron light sources.
“These cutting edge approaches have provided significant advances across the whole subject, generating high-profile international interest.”
You can track Dr Manning’s breakthrough in the field by following his Blog at http://dinosaursabbatical.blogspot.com/
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