This is the first of of five blogs by Dr. Jordan Mallon
profiling the contestant fossils featured in the museum’s Dino
Idol contest. From February 16 to March 17, visit the museum and
choose your favourite from among five dinosaurs, whose bones are
sealed away in plaster field jackets. Duck-billed dinosaurs
(hadrosaurids) are some of the most common fossils in Alberta,
but for some strange reason, their skeletons are often found
headless. Presumably, when these animals died, their skull bones
would disarticulate and wash away from the rest of the carcass,
which was held together by its various ligaments. Our first
specimen on offer for the Dino Idol contest, nicknamed
Headrosaur, is an interesting exception: it’s a head without a
body! The skull was found by Levi Sternberg in 1914, near what
is now Dinosaur Provincial Park (“the Park”) in Alberta. There
is very little information about what species this hadrosaurid
might be. It appears to have been collected in a hurry during a
very productive field season, a