Fossils

Zuul's skull

Visit Zuul transcript

Hi, I'm Dave Evans, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Ontario Museum. I'm standing in the middle of our field camp in southern Alberta, about a hundred kilometers south of Medicine Hat and just north of the US border. 

The ROM has been doing field work in southern Alberta for about a hundred years. We started working up in the Dinosaur Provincial Park area north of Brooks, but it was in the 1960s with Gord Edmond that we started working in the rocks right around here. Rocks of the Oldman formation.

We've been conducting fieldwork as part of the Southern Alberta Dinosaur Project out of this field camp for the last 15 years, and we've made some pretty awesome discoveries, but a few years ago pretty remarkable find was made just south of us across the US border in Montana, only a hundred kilometers from here or less, and that was discovery of one of the most complete armored dinosaurs that's ever been found. We acquired this specimen for the ROM. It's now in our collections, and it's where myself and Victoria Arbour, the world's expert in these tail clubbed ankylosaurs, worked on it and named it Zuul crurivastator. 

I'm Victoria Arbour. I'm an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto, and I helped name and describe Zuul crurivastator,  "the destroyer of shins." I was part of the team that named and described Zuul as a species new to science, so it's a brand new species of armored dinosaur. Armoured dinosaurs are really cool because they're the dinosaurs that are covered in amazing bony spikes and plates that are actually part of their skin, and they have a special name called osteoderms, and ankylosaurs, one group of them evolved a tail club so they have this amazing weapon on the end of their tail, a big ball of bone at the tip and a nice stiff handle kind of like a sledgehammer to swing at their enemies, and that's part of why we gave it the name "the destroyer of shins," because maybe those tail clubs were good for swinging at attacking predators like theropods.

We're here in the quarry where Zuul, our beautiful armored dinosaur was excavated. It was discovered in 2014, and it was discovered with quite a bit of serendipity. There was a team of private fossil collectors that were digging up a meat-eating Gorgosaurus -- it's a tyrannosaur that's a relative of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex -- that was found weathering out of the the hill just over my right shoulder here, and the skeleton was scattered, so they decided to dig a big hole to see if they could find the whole thing. 

In the process of digging this massive quarry, one of the earth mover excavators actually hit the tail club of what would turn out to be one of the most fantastic armored dinosaur specimens ever found. 

One of the reasons Zuul was so well-preserved is because none of it was eroding out of the hill when it was discovered. it was a total fluke accident, a sort of once-in-a-lifetime kind of find, and it would never have come out through natural erosion for thousands of years. 

Over the last couple days, we've been investigating the site here where Zuul was collected, trying to piece together the world that Zuul lived in. The rock layers read like pages of a book, and they allow us to reconstruct the environmental history of the area.

One thing that's really cool about this particular quarry, partly because it's so huge, is that we get a sense of all of the animals that lived alongside Zuul, so Zuul wasn't just like an isolated dinosaur living off by itself, it lived in an environment with turtles and crocodiles in a big tyrannosaur that might have been its main predator, and even just today we've been sitting here looking at some of the food that Zuul might have eaten, so we've been cracking open rocks that have beautifully preserved leaves, and so that tells us about Zuul's food. There are little bites on them that represent the insects that would have lived here, and it also can tell us a bit about the climate of this area, so obviously it's very dry here right now, but 75 million years ago this was a lush forest a little bit like what Louisiana or Florida looks like today.

This is one of the most amazing windows into the ecosystems that are represented in the rocks here of the Judith River Formation, and a spectacular window into Zuul's world.