Post by Curator Dr. Andrew T. McDonald
Throughout 2019, I shared with you updates as Western Science Center fossil prep lab volunteer Joe Reavis worked on four large jackets that we collected at a single site in the Menefee Formation of New Mexico in 2018, along with our colleagues from Zuni Dinosaur Institute for Geosciences and Southwest Paleontological Society. We knew these jackets contained various bones from a ceratopsid, one of the large, plant-eating, horned dinosaurs akin to Triceratops. In 2018, we could see several vertebrae, ribs, and a hip bone at the surface, so we made the jackets large enough to accommodate them and deep enough to contain any bones under the surface that we couldn't see.
Joe is now almost finished preparing all this ceratopsid material, so I wanted to give you a final update on this animal before I start posting about several other exciting projects in the WSC prep lab. All told, this partial skeleton is more complete than we realized in 2018. It includes the aforementioned hip bone (a right ilium), a long sequence of fused vertebrae situated between the hips (the sacrum), several ribs from the animal's torso, and 10 vertebrae from the back. Those 10 vertebrae were contained within two jackets, and were semi-articulated, having moved only slightly out of position since this carcass first came to rest on the muddy floodplain next to a river 79 million years ago.
Now that prep is nearly done, we'll soon start creating digital 3D models of the bones and 3D-printing them for education and exhibit. We're working on many additional fascinating Menefee fossils in the lab at WSC, so I'll have much more to share about the ancient Cretaceous ecosystem of which this ceratopsid was a part.