Dreadnoughtus

THE DAY WAS SEPT. 4, 2014, AND THE TIME WAS PRECISELY 9 A.M.

At that moment, Aja Carter (BS ’14) and Elena Schroeter (PhD ’13) dashed out the door of Drexel’s Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building. Facing the stream of crowds on the sidewalk of Chestnut Street, they shouted a long-held secret name, just because they finally could.

Inside the building, Drexel paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara stepped toward a podium. He felt the weight of a decade of hard work and waiting lift from his shoulders as he told the assembled crowd in the atrium what that name and that decade of effort represented.

That was the moment when a new gigantic dinosaur became real to science and to the world at large.

A scientific paper from Lacovara’s team, naming and formally describing the extraordinary new species, was published online then in the journal Scientific Reports. At 65 tons in life with a body the size of a house, this new dinosaur is the largest ever discovered for which a mass can be accurately calculated — and this individual was still growing when it died. With a skeleton far more complete and well preserved than any other of the largest-known dinosaurs, this specimen is poised to reveal new information about the physical workings of life at the upper limits of size for animals on land.

For many people, hearing this news and that name was a moment of awe, discovery and delight.

For those closest to the beast, who had labored over its 145 enormous bones over the past decade, it was the moment of release.

Outside, Carter and Schroeter shouted at the top of their lungs: “Dreadnoughtus!”

Everything is Multiplied

Schroeter first met the dinosaur Dreadnoughtus schrani in the winter term of 2009, when she traveled to southern Patagonia in Argentina. It was the first year of her graduate studies under Lacovara and the team’s final field season digging up the Dreadnoughtus skeleton there. As she got to work on her major task that summer of shoring up the bones’ protective plaster casts to prepare them for shipment, she quickly learned one of the defining truths about this dinosaur: “Work goes into every discovery when you have a dinosaur that’s brand new. But in this particular instance, everything was so big, everything is multiplied,” she says.

Getting those enormous and numerous bones out of the ground, then halfway across the world to Philadelphia and into the scientific record, took hundreds of people thousands of hours of labor. In baking desert heat, in windstorms and in multilingual legal negotiations, the scientists and students who knew Dreadnoughtus first, spent more time and effort on this beast than is typical of most projects in paleontology.

Over four field seasons, Lacovara estimates he spent about a year of his life sleeping in
his tent in Patagonia while digging up Dreadnoughtus during the day. At one point during the years of fossil prep in his lab, he tried to track the hours spent at work there. (Preparation of Dreadnoughtus fossils was also done in the labs at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University and at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.) He gave up and just counts the total by order of magnitude: Thousands of person-hours went into preparing those bones over a period of five years — five years spent removing the thin outer layers of rock, stabilizing decompression cracks and reassembling bits that had crumbled and holding them together with glue and putty. Thousands of hours of 3D laser scanning to preserve digital models of the bones took two years. Writing the manuscript of the scientific paper took about a year and a half.

“There are paleontologists that would step over Dreadnoughtus and keep on going,” Lacovara says. “Maybe they’re smarter. They would dig up and publish five dinosaurs in the time I spent on just this one. But I want to do the things that are hard. I feel a responsibility toward the animal. Once you find it, you’ve got to take care of it.”

There are some pretty cool names for dinosaurs, but Dreadnoughtus, fearless, for a non-meat-eater — that’s awesome. Awesome as in cool, but also awesome as in cool, but also awesome as in awe inspiring — Aja Carter

How to Hunt Giants

Finding a dinosaur in Patagonia is not difficult, if you know what to look for.

In the Connecticut-sized area where Lacovara has the rights to prospect for Cretaceous fossils, virtually every rock on the ground is a fossil, and many of those fossils are dinosaurs.

But loose rocks on the ground are usually too weathered and disconnected from other fossil bones to identify, and are separated from their geological context. Paleontologists prospect for more informative finds by looking for fossils that are still mostly buried in the sediments that preserved them. And they do this by walking with their eyes open and hoping to get lucky with a buried find.

It was the first day of the second field season when unreasonably good luck struck in the form of one tiny piece of bone peeking through the sediment.

At first the field team members thought it was fragmentary like everything else, recalls Christopher Coughenour (BS ’04, PhD ’09), who was on the first day of his first paleontological dig ever as a first-year doctoral student in geology under Lacovara after earning his undergraduate degree in physics.

“We started to excavate around it and it kept getting bigger and bigger,” says Coughenour. “That ended up being the discovery femur.”

By the second day, with the whole field team digging, the more they dug, the more they saw, and the more they then had to dig. To extract a fossil bone from the ground, you have to dig deeper underneath to be able to stabilize the bone on a pedestal of supporting sediment and wrap it in plaster on all sides for safe transport. But when it turns out the bone you are digging has more bones underneath, you need to tunnel further down.

Find more bones, and it’s time to dig deeper still.

“When we have to work to take one bone out, another bone appeared under it, so we had to go deeper and deeper,” says Lucio Ibiricu (PhD ’10), who was part of every field expedition with Lacovara in Patagonia — initially as an Argentinan undergraduate volunteer, then as a doctoral student at Drexel. “When we work on one bone, another bone appeared under it, deeper. This was a nice problem to have.”

The next year, Lacovara came back with rein- forcements: More students, including Alison Moyer (BS ’08), joined the expedition.

“There was just so much to dig up that everyone was digging up something at all times,” Moyer recalls. “Everybody got a section and went to it. I remember spending a lot of time on the rib yard. It was like pick-up sticks of ribs about 10 feet long.”

Moyer spent most of her second field season on one bone, the cervical vertebra, or neck bone. It was three feet across and so difficult to extract that Moyer was one of the few members of the team flexible enough to get into the hole to dig underneath it.

But if it sounds like a relatively straightforward task — heads down, dig in, get it done — hold on. There were a few outside challenges.

Nights were cold, and days were baking hot. Temperatures also swung without warning.

At times in the quarry, the wind would come rolling over the hills and the team would stop and looking at each another, knowing.

“It was just enough time for us to take cover, duck down and cover our faces with our shirts,” Moyer says. “It was raining dirt and rocks and the wind would just take over.”

It took two more field seasons to extract all of the dinosaur’s remains.

Chipping Away

For the first several field seasons, while plaster jackets filled with Dreadnoughtus bones piled up in the team’s gaucho’s mother’s chicken yard, Lacovara remained unsure whether the bones would ever leave Argentina for detailed study.

Fossils found in Argentinian soil belong to that country, and negotiating a research loan in a multilingual mix of science and legalese took countless suspenseful hours of negotiation and muddy translation. By 2009, the loan was finally secured.

The dinosaur arrived in Philadelphia by cargo ship with a total of 234 jackets protecting 16 tons of bones. A boisterous crowd celebrated opening the shipping container at the port on May 1, 2009.

Then a group of 20 experienced fossil preparators got to work unloading the heavy jackets from the truck.

Aja Carter (BS ’14), then 18 years old and not yet a Drexel freshman, was among them. As a volunteer at the Academy of Natural Sciences, where Dreadnoughtus field team member Jason

Poole manages the fossil prep lab, Carter had heard rumors about this giant dinosaur since she was 14.

Unloading the truck filled with extraordinarily large bones was humbling for Carter. This dinosaur sealed the deal — she was definitely attending Drexel.

The years of Carter’s undergraduate study were the same years of Dreadnoughtus’ lab preparation and study. Lacovara and his graduate students regularly invited undergraduate volunteers to come by the fossil lab and get involved in the process of preparing a piece of prehistory for future study.

Carter put in far more of her prep time over the years at the Academy of Natural Sciences, which began its affiliation with Drexel two years after the arrival of Dreadnoughtus bones, in 2011. As a longtime volunteer, Carter spent many of her undergraduate years in the Academy’s public-facing lab while preparing this dinosaur.

“I got to see kids’ faces, gaping, wide eyed,” she recalls. “We had this femur propped against the wall. They didn’t always know what a femur was, but when I asked them to look at their thigh bone, and then said ‘This one bone is as tall as your mom or your dad or your aunt’— it took them a second, but then they got it.”

Lab and Family Secrets

Lacovara’s son, Rudyard, now 7 years old, may be the one person in the world who is the least impressed by Dreadnoughtus. He was not quite two when the shipping container filled with fossils arrived in Philadelphia, so he has no memory of life before his dad had a dinosaur, or before it had the name Dreadnoughtus.

And for all that time, the name was the family secret, never to be spoken in public.

The secret was also shared among members of Lacovara’s lab and the scientific collaborators from other institutions who worked on describing the species. The secret was for good reason: A new species name isn’t real until it’s introduced in a scientific paper, so it had to be closely held. And a name as cool as ‘Dreadnoughtus’ or “Fears Nothing”? That’s one you want to keep for yourself.

Going hand-in-hand with that secret was one other rule that shaped life in Lacovara’s lab for a period of years. The rule was written clearly on a sign in Lacovara’s lab for the better part of that decade: “No photos.”

 

It was unlikely, but still possible, that if any pictures of the bones had appeared online then another scientist could have used information from the photos to describe and name it as a new species, beating Lacovara’s team to the punch. To eliminate that risk, Lacovara disallowed outsiders from taking photos in the lab, except when the dinosaur’s bones were covered up. For lab insiders, photos they took remained hidden away and saved for the future, or posted only on the lab’s private Facebook group.

“The picture thing was the weirdest,” Schroeter recalls. “People are taking pictures of salt shakers and putting them on Twitter. But you can’t do that with arguably the most important thing in your life at that moment.”

When she graduated with her PhD in 2013 based primarily on work with Dreadnoughtus, Schroeter proudly posed for photos in the lab beside her parents, professors and fellow graduate students, while wearing her cap and gown — but not on her parents’ cameras. She had to take a separate “Facebook-safe” photo without the bones to share that moment with extended family and friends.

The Aftermath and the Afterlife

The floodgates to share Dreadnoughtus — the name and all the photos — burst open on Sept. 4. That day, Lacovara was inundated with media requests, appearing on national and international television and radio broadcasts and commenting for print and online news stories worldwide. Most of the rest of the team spent the morning frantically posting years of old photos and stories to Facebook, at long last.

That initial joy of sharing the experience of finding Dreadnoughtus was only the beginning of what the dinosaur’s public unveiling is bringing to life.

Much of that is the wonder of the life that Dreadnoughtus lived, before it became a pile of buried bones. What makes this animal so interesting, so worth the decade of hard labor for dozens of people, is all that those bones reveal about the living animal it once was and about the potential for life on Earth, previously unknown.

Dreadnoughtus, for an animal so astonishingly huge, somehow managed to do all the ordi- nary and mundane tasks common to life, from eating and walking to breathing and reproducing. Yet doing so for an animal so large is hard to contemplate. Can you picture a two-story house eating, breathing and sometimes standing up to take a walk? You would want to get out of the way. You would wonder how it’s possible. And now there’s potential for scientists to find out.

The imposing size of this animal is just part of the reason for its name, inspired by early-20th-century battleships called dreadnoughts. The dinosaur’s species name, “schrani,” was chosen in honor of American entrepreneur Adam Schran, who provided support for the research. In life, this dinosaur also would have feared no threat in its environment because of its powerful muscles. Along the 30-foot tail, each vertebra pairs with a set of bones called chevrons that have a spur of bone pointing downward where the tail-wagging muscles attached. In other long-necked, long-tailed sauropod dinosaurs, those attachment spurs taper down to a fine point, but in Dreadnoughtus they flare out into wide paddles for a strong muscle attachment point. This gave the creature what Lacovara calls a “weaponized tail.” It could swat any predator away easily without slowing its steady vacuum-slurp of all nearby vegetation.

Dreadnoughtus was an herbivore. Only planteaters can possibly grow to be the largest animals in an ecosystem because a large percentage of the energy is lost with each step up in the food chain — and for an animal as large as Dreadnoughtus, it would take a large percentage of all the energy an ecosystem could produce just to maintain its body size. A lot of ecological questions about how Dreadnoughtus lived in its environment are still unanswered, but that much is certain.

Lacovara speculates that to maintain its body size, Dreadnoughtus would need to eat all of the vegetation within reach of its 37-foot neck, then take a few steps to one side and start over.

Many of the remaining questions about how Dreadnoughtus lived and moved may be answerable thanks to the many types of bones recovered and the quality of their preservation. Lacovara and his current and former students are already working on additional scientific papers addressing biomechanical questions as well as more technical analyses of the shape of the bones.

And the impact extends far beyond Lacovara’s own lab at Drexel. “Dreadnoughtus has become an important data set in the study of sauropods,” Lacovara says. “If you’re writing about the environment, evolution and anatomy of sauropods, there’s a pretty good chance you want to include this one.”

Lacovara noted it was gratifying to see that in the fall, several presentations at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Berlin incorporated reference to Dreadnoughtus in other dinosaur research.

As for the students who worked alongside him, their experience with the fossil has helped them move ahead in the field.

“Dreadnoughtus has really been a big career boost for the students,” Lacovara says. “Other professors know they worked on this, that they have good skills and can do the hard work.”

The thing people don’t realize about [fossil]prep work is it’s so dirty—Elena Schroeter

Moyer is now in the final year of a PhD program at North Carolina State University
in molecular paleontology, a new subspecialty pioneered by her advisor, Mary Schweitzer, who famously extracted soft tissues and proteins from T. rex fossils. Schroeter is joining her there as a postdoctoral fellow. Coughenour is now an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Johnstown campus, where he directs the Department of Energy and Earth Resources. Ibiricu is a scientist with Argentina’s equivalent of the National Science Foundation. Carter is beginning a doctoral program in paleontology at the University of Pennsylvania.

This winter, Lacovara and his students were hard at work packing wooden crates to send Dreadnoughtus back home to Argentina.

The Academy’s Jason Poole once told Carter that, as paleontologists, they have the glorious job of ushering ancient animals into their afterlife.

For Dreadnoughtus, the afterlife has finally begun.

Take a tour of Ken Lacovara’s dinosaur lab