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You might think that because the fossils are in the museum, they're not new to science. They're discovered, understood. But museums are not as neat and orderly as you think. You imagine that everything would be properly identified and properly labelled. The reality is more like the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the anonymous crate containing the ark is hauled off into the dimly lit corridors of a warehouse. Museums are a lot like that. In fact, even the displays can hold new stuff. The giant ceratopsian Titanoceratops (left) is actually on display at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, and had been there for years. It just took some description and a new analysis to show that it wasn't a Pentaceratops, as long thought, but something entirely new.
You might spend days wandering around in the badlands without finding anything worth collecting, let alone something complete enough to write a paper about. You will probably need hundreds of man-hours in the field to make a discovery. But with the museum... you can draw on decades worth of collecting efforts, by dozens of people. A day in the field, you see a few dozen bones. That's a good day. One day in collections, you can see thousands.
Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution
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My approach to finding new dinosaurs is different from the approach people typically envision. The typical impression people have is one of paleontologists adventuring off to the remotest reaches of the desert, far beyond roads, beyond civilization, to places so godforsaken you can't even find a Starbucks. My expeditions are different.
I throw my laptop and my camera setup into my pack, head off to a museum to rummage through their fossils, and crash on a friend's couch for a few days. Why head to the museum instead of the badlands? Because that's where the fossils are.
Hesperonychus elizabethae
Albertonykus borealis
Machairasaurus leptonychus
This approach also revealed "Bigassomimus", which is a non-official name for a very large, primitive ornithomimosaur from the Dinosaur Park Formation (Longrich, 2008). There is a closely related but much smaller species from the Aguja Formation, which, of course, was dubbed "Littleassomimus"
Naming new dinosaurs is probably the least serious part of my research (that being said I do take science seriously; I just don't feel we have to be deadly serious all the time to do serious science... or that we always have to take ourselves so seriously). But what this work has shown is that it's possible to use museum-based studies, when conducted in a carefully targeted fashion, to make major new discoveries about evolution.
Recognizing new species is an exercise in biodiversity- understanding how many species there are, and what they're related to. You can't understand evolution without first knowing what exists; you can't study the origin of species and their extinction without recognizing species in the first place. For me, taxonomy- understanding and naming species- isn't an end goal, it's a jumping off point for investigating the tree of life, and the processes that shape it.
I'm all in favor of synthetic studies, combing through databases to study evolution. But that data has to come from somewhere... and when the necessary data simply don't exist to answer a major question, that's where there's an opportunity to use collections to generate new data and solve an important problem. For instance, my K-T birds project (Longrich et al. 2011; PNAS), the proto-snake Coniophis (Longrich et al., 2012, Nature) and a new project looking at lizards (Longrich et al., in review).
That being said... I love fieldwork. I love wandering through the badlands alone and startling a coyote. Sitting down to pick through a bunch of fish scales and dinosaur teeth. Scrambling up and down steep sandstone hillsides. My science isn't wholly collections-derived; I've also described the dinosaur Texacephale, for instance, and discover one of the specimens that we ended up describing. At this point in my career, I am focused more on projects with an immediate payoff. But in the long run, our field depends on new discoveries. The only reason my museum prospecting is possible because people before me have put in the time to collect these fossils.
Here's a list of dinosaurs I've discovered in collections and named:
Just because something is dug up, prepared, and put into collections doesn't mean it's understood.
Anything could be in there. Somewhere in the museum, the object of the quest, the grail, the golden shiny Macguffin, is waiting. In the process of rummaging through drawers I've come up with something like eight new dinosaurs. Five are named, a couple more will hopefully be named soon.
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