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Student looks for dinosaur bones, fossils in Arlington

Written by Cohe Bolin

Thursday, 03 April 2008 05:51 PM

Biogeography Ph.D. candidate Derek Main calls himself the “dinosaur guy.” Main is part of an amateur paleontology group that found a hadrosaur in Arlington, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived in the Cretaceous Period. (The Shorthorn: Monica Lopez)

Derek Main is the university dinosaur guy.

He teaches the class Dinosaurs with geology professor Chris Scotese, a nonmajor course open to everyone.

Main is a Ph.D. candidate in dinosaur biogeography and received his master’s from the university in the biogeography of hadrosaurs in 2005.

Scotese is working on the Paleomap Project, where he shows how the earth has transformed over the last 100 million years.

“We are developing computer maps of where dinosaurs were located all across the world through time,” Main said.

He and a some fossil hunters and students dig for dinosaur bones and other fossilized material at an Arlington excavation site discovered in 2003, he said. The site is on what will eventually be a housing development off Main and Collins streets.

“The rocks we are digging in are part of the Woodbine Formation [sediments deposited in this part of Texas],” Main said. “In fact, UTA is built on the Woodbine Formation. The rocks are roughly 100 million years old.”

The dinosaur they think they have found is a protohadrosaur, a primitive hadrosaur, Main said.

Main named the site the Arlington Archosaur Site, because the animals found there include hadrosaurs, crocodiles and possibly theropods.

“The name archosaur means ruling reptile,” Main said. “The ruling reptiles of Arlington, you could say.”

The theropods are carnivorous and very rare in this area, Main said. The group thinks it has found a tooth and vertebrae of the species, he said.

“This would make this an extremely important site,” anthropology senior Phil Kirchhoff said.

Kirchhoff and Bill Walker, a Tarrant County Medical Examiner latent-print examiner, discovered the site during a hike. Fossil hunters Art Sahlstein and his daughter Olivia also are credited with finding the site, Kirchhoff said.

“A buddy of mine and I were out fossil hunting, and we came up on the site,” Kirchhoff said. “We had to hike through some snaky, swampy land.”

Kirchhoff and Walker found a five-inch tooth and discovered it was from the Cretaceous period.

It was difficult to get to the site becaue the original landowners wouldn’t let the group look for the fossils, Main and Kirchhoff said. The landowners hoped Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones would want the land for the new stadium.

Now that the Huffines Auto Group owns the land, the fossil hunters can visit regularly, and the materials found are donated to the university, Kirchhoff said.

Main and Kirchhoff will present their findings to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology this fall, Kirchhoff said. Right now he photographs and describes the material found.

The findings will eventually go on display at River Legacy Parks in Arlington, Main said.

In addition to bones, the group found what seems to be charcoal rocks, or conglomerates, rocks made of other types of rocks, which shows evidence of a forest fire in Arlington 100 million years ago, Scotese said.

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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 24 September 2008 03:12 PM )

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