In a field trip to Utah, USA, Tucker used his knowledge of both palaeontology and geology to consider how and why a particular fossil assemblage was found where it was.PHOTO: Supplied by Ryan Tucker
For two months every year, amid frequent sandstorms, extreme temperatures and thunderstorms, my office is a tent in the middle of arid badlands in Utah in the United States, or the Gobi Basin of Mongolia.
We are finding more evidence about the dinosaurs that roamed these areas some 100 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous period.
I am a senior lecturer in sedimentology and palaeontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, working in collaboration with Lindsay Zanno from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science (NCSM).
Ryan Tucker is currently in a remote part of the East Gobi Basin, Mongolia for fieldwork where he is helping with excavation and interpretation work.PHOTO: Supplied by Ryan Tucker
This year, fieldwork took me to the East Gobi for seven weeks during July and August. The landscape greatly varies, from floodplains, dune-filled deserts to acidified lakes.
I’m normally the one rousing my team members from their tents by first light with the small luxury of plunger coffee, before we hike to our excavation sites.
I am our team’s official geologist. I use my knowledge of both palaeontology and geology to consider how and why a particular fossil assemblage occurs where it does, how it was preserved, and its age. Much like a modern detective, I use rock-based clues to help determine what the local environment was like and what climatic conditions were at play when the animals still lived.
While in the Gobi this year, we expanded on some of our previous year’s excavations and continued to collect climatic data for reconstructing across the region. We were quite successful and are already making plans for the 2025 Mongolian field season. A large-scale study is underway to understand paleoclimatic trends in eastern Asia 125 to 83 million years ago.
Just before I left for Mongolia, a paper I was first author of was published in Sedimentology.1 It is about the tectono-sedimentary history of the upper Cedar Mountain Formation in Central Utah.
An artist’s impression of Fona herzogae, a dog-sized plant-eating dinosaur that lived partly in underground burrows.Credit: Jorge Gonzalez
Our team recently published2 the anatomical description of the Fona herzogae, evidence of which was first found in the Cedar Mountain Formation during a field trip to Utah in 2013. It is a dog-sized plant-eating ancestor of the Thescelosaurus that lived partly in underground burrows. In subsequent years, I found four consecutive volcanic ash falls and calculated their radiometric age date in a study published in Geology.3 This has allowed us to put a remarkably accurate geological timescale of between 99.64 and 98.9 million years to our Fona finds.
I decided to work with dinosaurs when I was a five-year old standing in awe beneath a newly mounted Tyrannosaurus rex at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in the United States. Going from a small town in Wyoming, to doing a PhD at James Cook University in far north Australia then teaching in South Africa, I feel fortunate to have had great mentors, supportive parents and collaborators who have helped me in accomplishing my dreams.
