By Chelon Dyal
BYU is in possession of four rare and ancient artifacts; skulls of Cretaceous-era sauropods, dinosaurs with long necks and tails, and small heads.
These skulls are so rare that the four BYU has are the only uncovered Cretaceous sauropod skulls existing in North America, said Brooks Britt, assistant professor of geology.
The head of the sauropod was only connected to the vertebral column by one small vertebra. When the animal died, the head would usually fall off and come apart because the bones of the skull were not fused together, making complete sauropod skulls hard to come by, Britt said.
?You can?t just go around comparing skull to skull because they don?t exist,? Britt said.
Now BYU has two complete skulls and two partial skulls to study. The only other sauropod skulls found in North America had been from the Jurassic period, a previous era.
The bones were extracted last summer from a quarry at the Dinosaur National Monument located on the Utah-Colorado border, 20 miles outside of Vernal. The paleontologist team enlisted help from BYU to chisel out the bones.
A portion of the rock was removed from the quarry to be taken to BYU. Britt said it was about seven feet long, four feet wide and three feet thick. The slab of rock and embedded bones were transported to BYU in a truck, where the team got started on the painstaking process of removing the rock.
?We knew there was a skull because we could see the teeth,? Britt said. ?And sure enough, there was a complete skull preserved in the rock. Then we found another skull in the same rock.?
The four skulls, all found close to each other at the quarry, are now being studied to determine what group of sauropods they belong to.
?We know it doesn?t match any other skulls that have been described,? Britt said.
The skulls are all the same type, but it is a new species and genera.
?We?re really lucky we have skulls,? Britt said, ?but we also have neck and tail vertebrae. Those will help us find out what group these belong to.?
Britt?s team of BYU student geologists have worked for the past year to clean up and study the bones, including categorization. Anne Dangerfield, a BYU senior majoring in geology, has been heavily involved in the process.
?It is exciting to have possession of something so rare and to find the number of skulls that we did,? Dangerfield said. ?Having them in our collection to study is exciting.?
Britt, who has been digging up dinosaurs since he was 14 years old, is looking forward to what can be learned from the sauropod skulls.
?Here we?re looking at material that no one?s ever seen before, taking it out of the rock and putting it together and trying to figure out how it relates to other organisms. That?s a kick.?