Lost Worlds of the Dinosaurs

Curry Rogers and Rogers report that tiny fossils bring ancient ecosystems to life. For the past three decades they have been conducting expeditions to recover such fossils in the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, a 149-mile expanse of astoundingly beautiful badlands in central Montana....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific American 2024-02, Vol.330 (2), p.28
Main Authors: Rogers, Raymond R., Rogers, Kristi Curry
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Aquatic reptiles
Badlands
Dinosaurs
Expeditions
Fossils
Frogs
Paleontology
Parasites
Scientific method
Vertebrates
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Summary:Curry Rogers and Rogers report that tiny fossils bring ancient ecosystems to life. For the past three decades they have been conducting expeditions to recover such fossils in the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, a 149-mile expanse of astoundingly beautiful badlands in central Montana. Here in the very place where scientists got their first look at North America's dinosaurs starting in the 1800s, their team has discovered a wealth of fossils from an extraordinary array of previously unknown organisms that lived alongside those better-known dinosaurs. These fossils are a record of an ecosystem that flourished 10 million years before a killer asteroid slammed into Earth. They have been targeting special fossil assemblages called vertebrate microfossil bonebeds, or VMBs. These sites preserve thousands of small, hard parts of a diversity of animals, ranging from traces of microscopic parasites, to the scales of minnows, to bits of much bigger frogs, turtles, birds, mammals, crocodiles and dinosaurs.
ISSN:0036-8733
1946-7087
DOI:10.1038/scientificamerican0224-28