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Recent Highlights
Oregon's First Dinosaur Find: A series of newspaper articles, some included below, were published on Oregon's first dinosaur. In 2018 we published on a duckbill dinosaur sacrum we excavated on the Oregon Coast in 1994 (see above). It was discovered in the 1960's by scientists with the U. S. Geological Survey. Berkeley paleontologists visited the site in 1969 and made field notes on the dinosaur specimen. National Geographic Magazine published an article in January 1993 recording the location of the dinosaur find. By 1994 we had ascertained that the specimen belonged to a duckbill, by the number of fused vertebrae together with sacral ribs. Duckbills have 8 or more sacral vertebra, which the Oregon specimen preserves. Its excavation was also featured in a 1995 story by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Books citing the dinosaur fossil include Weishampel (1990, 1992) and Weishampel et al. (2004). Also, Orr & Orr (2009 & 2012) in their editions of "Oregon Fossils" discussed the Cape Sebastian specimen and noted that it is from a probable hadrosaur.
References
Orr, E. L. and Orr, W. N. (2009): Oregon Fossils. Second Edition. Oregon State University Press, Corvallis,
Oregon. 300 p.
Orr, E. L. and Orr, W. N. (2012): Oregon Fossils. Third Edition (what is date of first edition) ?
Weishampel, D. B., (1990), Dinosaur Distribution. In: Weishampel, D. B., Dodson, P., and Osmólska, eds. H.
1990. The Dinosauria, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, USA, p. 63-139
Weishampel, D. B., (1992), Dinosaur Distribution. In: Weishampel, D. B., Dodson, P., and Osmólska, eds. H.
1990. The Dinosauria, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, USA, p. 63-139
Weishampel, D. B., Barrett, P. M., Coria, R. A., Loeuff, J. L., Xing, X., Xijin, Z., Sahni, A., Gomani, E. M. P., and
Noto, C. R., (2004), In: Weishampel, D. B., Dodson, P., and Osmólska, eds. H. 1990. The Dinosauria, 2nd
edition, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, USA, p. 948-1202.
Oregon's Earliest Whale: Uhen and Taylor (2020) published on the earliest whale from Oregon, also the earliest confirmed basilosaurid (a modern whale ancestor) from the North Pacific. The find is based on three thoracic vertebrae from Vernonia, Oregon. The specimen is about 35-36 million years old, while the first whale ancestors appeared nearly 15 million years earlier. That entire period of time is marked by a lack of whale fossils from the North Pacific. We know little of why the earliest whales are so rare in the North Pacific, but it may have had to do with scarcity of shallow-water deposits in which the fossils would most likely be found perhaps in combination with cool oceanic waters that may have inhibited their presence in the region.
