Читать книгу Dino Gangs: Dr Philip J Currie’s New Science of Dinosaurs - Josh Young - Страница 7

The special group of palaeontologists loosely known as dinosaur hunters are detectives who spend their lives trying to put together pieces of an ancient mystery that may never be fully solved. The dino hunter is part historian, part explorer, part scientist. He attempts to reconstruct history which dates back more than 65 million years – or 60 million years before the first human – through a combination of research, fieldwork and lab work. To do so he must raise public and private money to fund expeditions, navigate foreign government bureaucracies to gain access to critical sites, endure the harsh conditions of some of the most brutal climates on earth, outsmart poachers looking to make a buck on the black market, and recruit young palaeontologists to assist in the field and the lab.

Dinosaur finds can be traced to the ancient times of the Western Jin Dynasty of China, when they were thought of as ‘dragon bones’, although the first identified dinosaur find occurred in 1676, in England. Part of a large bone was found in a limestone quarry at Cornwall and described the following year by Oxford professor Robert Plot as the femur of a large animal like an elephant. However, some people concluded later that it must have belonged to a giant human like those written about in the Bible. It wasn’t until 1824 that the first scientific description of a dinosaur was written by another Oxford professor, William Buckland. After collecting a large number of dinosaur bones over a nine-year period, Buckland determined they were all from a related animal that resembled a giant lizard, and he published a scientific paper describing a great fossilized lizard that he named Megalosaurus. Although this was the first dinosaur described, the term ‘dinosaur’ wasn’t coined until 1842 when Richard Owen recognized that the remains shared a number of features and therefore should be grouped together taxonomically.

An artist’s impression of the duckbilled dinosaur Corythosaurus.

Jaime Chirinos/Science Photo Library

The first recorded North American dinosaur find was made in 1838 by John Estaugh Hopkins in a mudstone quarry on the Cooper River in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Hopkins displayed in his house the bones he found, where they were seen by his friend William P. Foulke, a part-time geologist. Foulke returned to the quarry and discovered most of a skeleton, which he asked palaeontologist Joseph Leidy to help him extract and study. Leidy scientifically described the find and named it Hadrosaurus foulkii, or ‘bulky reptile’. The Hadrosaurus find would lead to what became known as the ‘bone wars’ which erupted between dinosaur hunters Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, who were both mentored by Leidy.

Marsh, of Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, and Cope, of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, were initially cordial and shared information on their finds. But a dispute broke out over a fossil site that was discovered by Cope just south of the Haddonfield site. Cope was having the site’s new finds sent to him for examination, but when Marsh realized there were an untold number of bones to be recovered, he began paying those digging the site to divert the finds to him. Cope found out about Marsh’s underhanded tactics, and the gloves came off.

For the next 20-plus years, Marsh and Cope used all means available – including bribery and theft – to outdo one another in the search for dinosaur bones. Both men spent considerable sums of money trying to win the ‘bone wars’ and to be recognized as the undisputed leader in the new field of dinosaur palaeontology. Marsh was backed by a wealthy uncle, George Peabody, the financial backer of Yale’s Peabody Museum, while Cope used his considerable family money. Some of their work was rushed and sloppy. Marsh named both Apatosaurus in 1887, and Brontosaurus in 1889. He did not have a skull for the latter and when it was mounted, a Camarasaurus skull was put on it. Eventually it was discovered that (other than the Camarasaurus skull) Apatosaurus was the correct name for both specimens. Cope made a similar hurried mistake on Elasmosaurus. Despite the duo’s lack of professional ethics, they found an exceptional number of specimens and localities for future study. Marsh was credited with discovering 80 new dinosaur species and Cope named 56 – and a competitive stage was set for future dino hunters.

Two of the most famous dino hunters who followed them (but who did not resort to underhanded tactics) were Barnum Brown and Roy Chapman Andrews. Brown, who was named after the legendary circus showman P.T. Barnum, was the American Museum of Natural History’s main dinosaur collector in the early 1900s. He is best known as the man who discovered Tyrannosaurus rex in 1902 in the Hell Creek Formation in south-eastern Montana. Several years after that landmark find, he travelled to Alberta, Canada and led an expedition down the Red Deer River that discovered, among other dinosaur fossils, several Albertosaurus hind feet in the same location, which he had shipped back to the Museum of Natural History.

Andrews was an adventurer who also worked for the American Museum of Natural History and later became its director. He began his natural history quest studying whales in the coastal waters near Vancouver Island in British Columbia, where he collected the skeleton of a humpback whale. He next convinced the museum’s director, Henry Fairfield Osborn, to fund the first expedition to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia to search for the origins of man. Though Andrews failed to find any evidence of early man over the course of five expeditions from 1922 to 1930, he and his team found reams of dinosaur skeletons, among them the first Protoceratops, Oviraptor and Velociraptor. On their expedition in 1923, they identified the first fossilized dinosaur eggs, which were initially thought to be those of Protoceratops but were identified in 1995 as Oviraptor eggs.

The work of Brown and Andrews set the standard for future dino hunters. Their finds were remarkable in their time, but they would become even more important as they were re-examined by future palaeontologists. Their work inspired and informed a group of palaeontologists who would revolutionize the discipline in the late 1970s and would ultimately galvanize public interest in dinosaurs.

‘The reason that the world needs palaeontologists is because, just think about it: if you go back 68 or 70 million years ago, the largest animal on land was a dinosaur, and mammals were very small,’ palaeontologist Louis Jacobs explains. ‘If you go to Africa now, the largest land animal in the world is an elephant, a mammal, and you can go and you can see a bird sitting on top of an elephant. That’s a dinosaur on top of a mammal. So what’s happened in the last 65 million years is the entire ecological arrangement of life has changed, and if we can understand how that ecological arrangement of life has changed and why it changed, that tells us about how the world works. Knowing how the world works is what humans need to know right now to understand the future.’

Phil Currie wanted to be a dinosaur hunter for as long as he can remember. When he was 11, Currie read Andrews’ book All About Dinosaurs, and he was hooked. He was captivated by the life led by dinosaur hunters, and he loved reading about how Andrews battled wild animals and travelled to exotic places to search for evidence of these huge beasts, and then returned to the lab to study them. He knew right away what he wanted to do with his life. ‘I had a fascination with the lifestyle and the animal, this two-legged beast that looks a little bit like us – but is meaner,’ he says.

Currie’s first quest came when he was a young, six-year-old boy searching for a plastic T. rex in his Rice Krispies cereal box. Each box of cereal had a sticker declaring ‘Free Dinosaurs!’ Currie managed to collect all the other ‘dinosaurs’, although some of the plastic figures were not actually dinosaurs – they were flying reptiles or, in the case of Brontosaurus, misnamed. In the beginning, Currie would dig into the box for the T. rex. When it wasn’t there, he would ask his mother to buy another box. But his mother made him eat the entire box of cereal before she bought another. ‘By the time the end of the promotion came, I had multiple copies of everything and I was sick of the cereal, but I didn’t have the T. rex,’ he says.

Soon, Currie was looking at the genuine article. He regularly visited the Royal Ontario Museum to see dinosaur remains. At the age of 12, his mother arranged for him to meet Bill Swinton, the museum’s director. Swinton was an English scientist who had done some work on dinosaurs and written a number of books on them. He took a liking to the ambitious Currie and introduced him to other palaeontologists. Currie would write to them and ask what classes he should take in high school to put him on the road to becoming a dinosaur hunter.

After several museum visits, Currie realized that most of the dinosaurs in the museum had come from Alberta. In 1961, he convinced his parents to take the family on a trip out west so he could visit actual dinosaur sites. ‘It was great because I got to see the field sights where the specimens were being taken out, but it was a little bit disappointing because I didn’t see this wealth of dinosaur skeletons I imagined were there,’ Currie recalls. ‘I figured that if there are so many dinosaur skeletons in the Royal Ontario Museum and so many specimens were found in Alberta, there must be far more to be seen. Well, there wasn’t because they were all in the eastern museums.’

Often children become interested in dinosaurs when they first see the impressive re-creations, but over time they lose their interest. In Currie’s case, whenever his interest waned he would return to the Royal Ontario Museum and see the real dinosaur skeletons again. By the time he was 12, he had decided that he would move to Alberta and dig dinosaurs when he grew up.

After high school, Currie put himself on a path to becoming a dinosaur palaeontologist. He attended the University of Toronto so he could volunteer in the lab at the Royal Ontario Museum, located on the university’s campus. As a college student, he began working on the dinosaur bones the museum was studying, and he made valuable personal contacts in the field.

By the time he finished his bachelor’s degree, Currie realized that he needed to leave Toronto because there was no one there working full time on dinosaurs or fossil reptiles to mentor him. He studied for his master’s degree at McGill University in Montreal, where noted palaeontologist Bob Carroll became his supervisor. Because Carroll worked primarily on the origin of reptiles, Currie did not focus directly on dinosaurs, but he knew that he could accumulate a base of knowledge and apply it to his dinosaur studies later.

‘Whenever his interest waned Currie would return to the Royal Ontario Museum.’

In 1976, after Currie had started working on his PhD at McGill, he received a call from a former professor of his at the University of Toronto. A job had opened up at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (which became the Royal Alberta Museum in 2005), and the professor encouraged Currie to apply despite the fact that Currie had completed only a year of his doctorate. Although the museum said that it was looking for someone with a PhD, Currie decided to fly to Alberta and attend an interview anyway.

Though other applicants were more qualified Currie was the only candidate who wanted to work specifically on dinosaurs; the others wanted to concentrate on fossil mammals and were only conceding to work on dinosaurs to further their other interests. Luckily for Currie, one of the scientists on the committee that interviewed him was David Spalding, who had a strong interest in the history of palaeontology and subsequently wrote books on hunting for dinosaurs.

‘I had no right to get that job,’ Currie says. ‘There were people that I was competing with who were much better qualified that I was, absolutely no question about it. But when I walked in and did the interview, it was like I became a different person. Subconsciously I was telling myself that this was my job and that I was the best person for it.’

Currie was hired, and with that he became one of a select group of full-time dinosaur palaeontologists in North America. The museum wanted Currie to undertake fieldwork, stage exhibitions and handle education and research. Currie couldn’t have been more motivated. But when he arrived, he discovered that his annual budget was a scant $4,000 – less than the cost of collecting a single dinosaur find. The struggle for research and fieldwork funding began immediately.

Dinosaurs are big and therefore logistically expensive to remove, and for years the financial resources weren’t readily available. The Second World War had wiped out money for most scientific research, and when funding recovered it was funnelled first into medical sciences. Though the public was hungry for information about dinosaurs, the funding simply wasn’t there. Research money went first into fossil fish, small fossil mammals, and anything connected to human origins and the ‘missing link’. For years, palaeontology found itself at the end of a long line, and by the late 1970s there were no more than a dozen full-time dinosaur palaeontologists in the entire world.

‘The large museums like the American Museum of Natural History and the Royal Ontario Museum felt that they already had their wonderful dinosaur displays,’ Currie says. ‘They felt they didn’t need any more, so why should they hire a dinosaur palaeontologist to do it? But the public still loved it. That kind of worked against us too – other scientists would say dinosaurs are popular in the public as kind of a gee-whiz thing, and why should we do research on dinosaurs when they are extinct?’

But the dinosaur renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s changed things. Leading palaeontologists John Ostrom and Dale Russell, followed by Ostrom’s students, Peter Dodson, Jim Farlow and Bob Bakker, were all working on ideas concerning dinosaurs as living animals and discussing them in terms the layperson could understand. ‘Things started to turn around when you started to get a few palaeontologists who were studying dinosaurs and made some rather special finds,’ Currie says. ‘The finds weren’t all that unique, but the way they marketed them was different. These were biologists rather than geologists, so they were looking at things differently.’

As the dinosaur renaissance was getting into its stride, Currie arrived at the Provincial Museum of Alberta in 1976 and staged his own mini-revolution in dinosaur research in Canada. Despite his limited budget, Currie dedicated himself to fieldwork. The odds were against him. The Alberta museum had been looking for years and hadn’t found anything interesting. Many palaeontologists believed that the eastern museums had already taken all the good specimens and there were none left.

There was also the issue of time and manpower. Dale Russell had done a study of the field notes of dinosaur hunters like Barnum Brown working in Alberta from 1910 to 1924 and calculated that, on average, during the golden period when major dinosaur discoveries were being made, it had taken about four man-months of walking to find one good specimen. Therefore, if you had four people searching, it would take one month to find a dinosaur. Currie had just one other person helping him and they would be in the field for only a month. What they needed was some luck.

Currie forged ahead with great determination. He knew early success was critical, and he had some. In his first year, near the Canada–US border, Currie collected a hadrosaurid, or duckbill dinosaur. Based on fossilized footprint evidence, duckbills walked around mostly on their hind legs and would go down on all fours whenever they were feeding. The biomechanics of their bodies also indicated that they weighed too much to support themselves full time on their hind legs. They had very long skulls, and at the front of the skull the mouth expanded into a duckbill. A hadrosaurid didn’t have teeth in the front part of its mouth but it had many in the back part of it, a structure that worked well for eating plants. Currie’s find generated enough publicity that people began to know who he was. He went way over budget on his first field outing and, had he not found something noteworthy, he says, he probably would have been laid off.

The following year, a petroleum company drilling a pipeline in Canada’s prairie badlands found another duckbill dinosaur. Currie convinced a government official to give him some additional summer funding and he started a volunteer programme so he had enough people to help excavate it. Together, Currie and his two technicians, along with four university students and one high-school student, headed to the badlands to dig out the dinosaur.

‘It was a good specimen – the part that was exposed,’ Currie says. ‘But as we followed it into the hill, literally moving tons of rock, and we got to the front, suddenly I found one tyrannosaur tooth in the ribs. I thought, uh oh. Then we went further and found another tooth. Then we kept going and found more tyrannosaur teeth and broken bone. So the front end of the skeleton had been eaten off by a tyrannosaur, probably Albertosaurus. The tyrannosaur had bitten through the bone. So we ended up with fragments of the hadrosaur bones and the teeth from the Albertosaurus where it had munched. That was kind of cool, and it did attract attention. It started a cycle.’

By 1978, Currie and his team were on a dinosaur-finding roll, so much so that the museum eventually ran out of storage space. Currie also arranged an exhibition called ‘Discovering Dinosaurs’, for which he borrowed all the Alberta dinosaur finds from other museums. ‘Discovering Dinosaurs’ broke all attendance records in 1979 and generated reams of publicity for the museum.

‘Currie always had it in the back of his mind to create a dinosaur display.’

The Provincial Museum of Alberta was a government institution and did not accept funding from private sources. The publicity from the finds and the exhibition caught the government’s attention and resulted in officials increasing funding for dinosaur hunting. However, for many years, even though a budget had been established for dinosaur research, when Currie reached the end of the fiscal year he would discover that the funding had been used to plug a hole in the budget somewhere else.

‘The politicians were concerned about dinosaur finds in Alberta,’ Currie says. ‘Our task was to prove that we still had the fossil resources and all we needed was manpower and money. We had to work a little bit on people’s pride because it is kind of a strange thing to know that you are really rich in something but to see it you have to go to another part of the world. We played a little bit on both things.’

Alberta was famous for its dinosaurs, yet it had no centralized place to showcase them. Currie always had it in the back of his mind to create a dinosaur display worthy of the dinosaur resources. At the Provincial Museum of Alberta, he had less than 45 square metres (500 square feet) of space to showcase his finds. ‘It was pathetic that all the biggest dinosaur Alberta displays were somewhere else.’

His big opportunity came in 1979 when Dinosaur Provincial Park in south-eastern Alberta had become such a hotbed of finds – led by Currie discovering and excavating a Centrosaurus bone bed there – that it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Dinosaur Park, as palaeontologists know it, covers nearly 19,000 hectares (73 square miles) and has produced more individual skeletons of different dinosaurs than any place of its size in the world. Currie began putting together a planning team to build a museum to showcase Alberta’s dinosaurs that was worthy of a UNESCO site.

In 1980, with the full support of Alberta Provincial Premier Peter Lougheed, the government agreed to finance a dinosaur museum. However, the museum would not be located in Dinosaur Park, because of the sensitive nature of the site, but nearly 170 kilometres (105 miles) away in Drumheller, a small town of 7,000 located in the heart of Canada’s badlands. Drumheller had been marketing itself as the land of dinosaurs since the 1950s. The town had a small dinosaur museum and several dinosaur-themed parks.

Currie was asked to submit a proposal for the museum. Knowing that government officials were generally more concerned with the public aspect of a museum than the research side, he outlined several options. One was to put in an interpretation centre in Drumheller – essentially a display without the back-up of a scientific research team on site. For the science, the museum would use palaeontologists in either Calgary or Edmonton, big cities with university-based possibilities for research.

‘I wasn’t keen on that because the reality is that displays like that tend to be dead displays in the sense that they are static. All the information comes in second hand, and there’s no real incentive to get things going,’ Currie says. ‘I put the hard sell on: “If you want to do this, you should do it right. You should store collections, have research staff to take care of the material and to collect new specimens, educational staff and the whole works; then you have a living museum.” I also knew the power of publicity. There are two kinds of publicity. One is the kind you pay for and it’s very expensive. As a government organization, we obviously didn’t have the budget for that. And then there is the kind of publicity where you do research and, if it’s interesting, it attracts the media and lets people know you exist.’

On Christmas Eve 1980, Currie received a phone call and was told the project was going to be the ‘Cadillac version’. In addition to the galleries, it would have a library, study centre and laboratory facilities. Currie made sure the museum had an extensive library, which at that time was a key to attracting top scientists, and a massive storage area that could house the specimens collected and awaiting examination. He was also able to persuade the government to lift its normal rules concerning scientists’ salaries, support staff and facilities. The museum was budgeted at $42 million though, because it was built during the 1981 recession, the final price tag was only $28 million.

The museum was completed in 1985 and was named after Joseph B. Tyrrell, who had arrived in 1884 on assignment to conduct a geological survey of the Red Deer River. He travelled to the badlands surrounding Drumheller looking for coal, and he accidentally stumbled on the skull of a large carnivore that was later named Albertosaurus. The museum would focus on celebrating the amazing finds that lived in Canada’s prairies more than 65 million years ago.

On its opening weekend, the Tyrrell Museum drew 30,000 people, and by the end of the first year, it had recorded 500,000 visitors. The dinosaur museum has remained so popular over the years that it has created its own economy and now attracts over $15 million in tourist revenue to the area annually. In 1990, the ‘Royal’ epithet was added, making it one of the most distinguished museums in Canada. ‘Suddenly, tourism started to be talked about in Alberta, and now it’s one of our major industries,’ Currie says. ‘We have people come to Alberta from Europe or Japan and parts of Asia who come specifically to see the Tyrrell Museum.’

Once the Tyrrell Museum was up and running, Currie was itching to return to the field. He had decided that he did not want to be a museum director. He felt that supervising the building and staffing of the museum would slow his progress as a dino hunter. An interim director supervised construction while a full-time director was sought. Currie served as an assistant director so he could maintain some control over what happened in the research and the collection sides of the museum, but once the museum was fully up and running, he backed out of that role and became nominally attached as Curator of Dinosaurs. ‘I wanted to go out in the field and do research and not be tied to the building giving tours, doing the administration and taking care of people,’ he says.

In October 2005, he left the Royal Tyrrell Museum to take up the Canada Research Chair in the Biological Sciences Department at the University of Alberta. For him, it was the ideal situation. He would have a base at the university which provided him office space and a laboratory, and he would be free to spend four months a year in the field searching for dinosaurs.

For Currie, fieldwork has always been the most exciting part of his craft, particularly when he and his team came up with major finds. ‘In Alberta, we excavated two Tyrannosaurus rex and I was very lucky that I was able to do that,’ he says. He laughs at the irony: as a child, he never did get the T. rex action figure in his Rice Krispies, but he found not one but two in real life. The most recent T. rex find was in Saskatchewan, the next province to Alberta.

But Currie has since turned his attention to Tarbosaurus. Tarbosaurus is an animal that initially was described as Tyrannosaurus bataar, and the relationship between the two predators fascinates Currie. One of the tyrannosaurs from 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.