Dinosaurs

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One theme of my work is systematics: how many species are there, and how are they related to one another?

For the most part, the discoveries I've worked on haven't come out of fieldwork. It's not that I don't like fieldwork- it's wonderful- it's just that trying to find something new by wandering around in the badlands takes time. A lot of time.

You can wander for days or weeks without finding a skeleton, and odds are that when you do find a skeleton, it will be something we already know. There are hundreds of skeletons that have been pulled out of the Hell Creek Formation in the American west, and hundreds pulled out of Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta... and from a scientific standpoint, do we really need another T. rex or another Triceratops skull? The odds of walking out into the badlands and stumbling across something new aren't terribly good. Even if you do, it might takes months of effort to open up a quarry and get it pulled out of the ground, and then you've got to get the specimen prepared and cleaned up before you can write a paper up.

So I've taken a different approach: looking at museum collections. True, most of the things in the museum have already been studied. But a lot of specimens haven't, and a lot of specimens need to be reexamined in the context of discoveries made in the past 20, 50, or 100 years since they were originally studied. And while the odds of success aren't particularly good- the odds that any one skeleton comes from something new are pretty low- the sheer number of specimens- you can study hundreds in a day- means that you actually have a pretty good chance of finding something that hasn't been recognized before. If you look long enough, and if you go in with a prepared mind. In this way I've managed to name a bunch of dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs I've described, most of them discovered in museums, include:

Alvarezsauridae

Albertonykus borealis Longrich and Currie 2009a

Dromaeosauridae: Microraptorinae

Hesperonychus elizabethae Longrich and Currie 2009b

Oviraptorosauria

Machairosaurus leptonychus

Leptorhynchos gaddisi

Ornithomimosauria

"Bigassomimus" Longrich 2008 (diagnosed by being a big-ass ornithomimosaur. The editors were spoilsports and would not let me use this name in print)

Pachycephalosauridae

Texacephale langstoni