MESOZOIC TALES

In the beginning of the 1900's raised a new dawn for scientific exploration. In the Tendaguru Beds of Tanzania, the most espetacular Jurassic fauna to date were being unearthed by german explorers such as Bernhard Wilhelm Sattler and Eberhard Fraas; In Mongolia, Roy Chapman Andrews and his team first discovered the Flamning Cliffs Formation, rich in the Late Cretaeous dinosaur fauna in which famous creatures such as Velociraptor and Protoceratops were described; In Brazil, Llewellyn Ivor Price (photo on the left, authorship unknown) discovered fossil vertebrates all over the country, including  one of the earliest of dinosaurs Staurikosaurus, from the Triassic Santa Maria Formation.

Several expeditions were taken on the 70's, 80's and 90's by several scientists all over the globe with a gradative change in which many of those field works were conducted by the local researchers, sometimes with foreign partnership such as Argentineans and USA Americans (who also cooperated with Niger and other countries in Africa), Polish and Mongolians, Brazilians, Chinese and the list goes on. By the 2000's there was a big boom in the Vertebrate Paleontology of China with its amazing fauna of avian dinosaurs.

Our science was taking a different course. The demanding pressure from the investors (private or public) for imediate publishing scientific articles in exchange of investiment has grown tremenduosly, and few researchers are now risking some time in the persue for new material in the field. Most of them are now looking around, recycling the old bone collections in the university and museums. Scientists with bigger budget buy the fossils and describe new species. That's really common nowadays in the Santana Formation of Brazil, also in China's everlasting fossil deposits and everywhere money can pay. The truth is that very few people go into the field for taking risks of coming back with empty hands.

However, we might also consider Vertebrate Paleontology evolving to something different than just amazing museum exhibitions. There's a bigger interest in understanding not only the mounted bones themselves, but also to obtain information about histology (blood cells and soft tissue preservation); about their pathologies (recovered fractures and diseases); studing taphonomy (the stages a dead organism passed through untill it became fossilized); Sistematics (relationships between different groups - there is a big fight on this matter); Biomechanics (how did the living animal walk? How strong was its bite force?); and Paleoecology (how did those faunas interact with themselves and their preterit environments?).

Very important those new advances in vertebrate paleontology are. Laboratorial techniques and multidisciplinary fields are taking our view of dinosaurs to a next level. We are also in an era of junk science too (this one, for example - I thought it was an April 1st joke). Serious researchers must keep cold and not surrender to the desperation of publishing without quality material to suport the very idea of his or her work.

Just one last thing. Although most advances nowadays are coming from laboratorial labour and reviewing collections, vertebrate paleontologists must keep going into the field. One never knows what we are about to discover. I mean, just buying the fossil from some dealer in the mines or a mercenary will never has the same informative value as a field work guided by specialists, following the procedures, and obtaining as maximum taphonomic and geological information as possible. Remember: There are lots of poorly explored areas around the world that still cares exploration.