Ever since he was a child, Dr Ryan Tucker wanted “to dig dinosaurs”. He tells MatieMedia’s William Brederode about the process of using geological forensics to reconstruct ancient worlds using the fragmentary remains of dinosaurs.
Dr Ryan Tucker grew up in Sheridan, in Wyoming, USA, and would spend the summers of his childhood digging dinosaurs. PHOTO: William Brederode
While most people grow out of their obsession with dinosaurs fairly young, Dr Ryan Tucker’s office in the chamber of mines at Stellenbosch University (SU) tells the story of a man fascinated by dinosaurs, and the world they lived in.
In this space, sedimentary rocks and prehistoric fossils are enmeshed together with his students’ examination scripts, stacks of field notes and electronic wiring.
“It’s actually gotten a lot better!” jokes Schalk Walters about the tidiness of Tucker’s office. Walters was Tucker’s first postgraduate student when he joined the SU earth sciences department as a geologist in 2014.
Tucker’s research interests are palaeontology and sedimentology.
“My primary focus is taphonomy – that’s kind of CSI for fossils. So, how they died, why they died, why they preserved and what age that rock is that they are emplaced in,” says Tucker.
Dr Ryan Tucker during a dinosaur excavation at the Crystal Geyser Quarry in Utah, USA. PHOTO: Supplied/Ryan Tucker
“The crew that I’m primarily working with… we seek out high risk, high adventure, high reward scenarios. We go into areas that are not explored. We don’t know if we’re going to find anything, but if we do, it’s new. It’s undescribed,” he says.
Piecing things together
Dragons are complete fantasy, but dinosaurs are like dragons – you have to use your imagination to see them. You have to envision a world that no person has ever seen before.
Tucker explains his job as having to paint a picture about a world that can only be seen using the fragmentary remains of information etched into rock and sediment.
“Dragons are complete fantasy, but dinosaurs are like dragons – you have to use your imagination to see them. You have to envision a world that no person has ever seen before.”
He says that he has the tools to access that imagination.
By analysing fossil records and the properties of sediments, palaeontologists can build a picture of what an environment might have been like during a certain era, and the behaviour that an organism would likely have exhibited, says Tucker.
“Pterosaurs were a group that is basically akin to dinosaurs. They lived at the same time,” says Dr Ryan Tucker, about the fossilised pterosaur specimens in the earth sciences department at Stellenbosch University. “These are small specimens. There’s Quetzalcoatlus [another type of pterosaur] that on the ground standing is the same size as a giraffe,” says Tucker. PHOTO: William Brederode
By way of example, Tucker explains how fossil findings can be used to deduce the level of parental behaviour that dinosaur species exhibited. Fossil sites such as Egg Mountain in Montana and the Oviraptor nest in Mongolia provide direct evidence of dinosaurs sitting on a nest.
A site in Patagonia called Auca Mahuevo, where a nesting site is surrounded by dinosaur tracks, provides a different case, says Tucker. “It’s not that the parents are directly on the nest, but they are protecting it.”
By piecing together these fragmentary findings, scientists have been able to understand the parental involvement of dinosaurs to a point which is quite sophisticated, says Tucker.
One of the seminal moments in Tucker’s career was his contribution to the discovery of Moros Intrepidus, a tyrannosauroid which was found in Utah, USA.
Tucker says that until Moros was discovered, all the tyrannosauroid’s found in the mid-cretaceous period were found in Asia.
Moros Intrepidus is a type of tyrannosauroid, discovered in Utah, USA, by a team that Dr Ryan Tucker was a part of. This discovery filled a major gap in knowledge about the dinosaur’s presence in North America. PHOTO: William Brederode
This finding “fill[ed] a major gap in our understanding of when tyrannosauroid’s came to North America”. In later time periods, tyrannosauroid’s became the forerunner of predatory dinosaurs in North America.
Tucker uses the analogy of a painting by Monet to explain his work.
“A painting by Monet has these little, tiny brush strokes. And, so, if you’re right next to the painting, you can see each individual stroke, but as you drift away from that picture those strokes come together to tell a story. And, so, the sediments, the fossils – all these clues come together to tell this holistic story.”
Technological developments have increased the sophistication of the body of knowledge of the ‘holistic story’ of earth’s history, but Tucker says that there is still plenty of work to be done.
The fragmentary record is getting better, says Tucker. “But it’s going to take generations of understanding.”
Team spirit
As an earth scientist, much time is spent in solitude doing field work. But there is a need for collaboration between researchers who can bring a unique skill set to a collaborative project, says Tucker.
While Dr Ryan Tucker needs to balance his commitment to his students at the university with his research interests, he says in an ordinary world he would spend three months of the year in his tent, working in the field. PHOTO: Supplied/Ryan Tucker
Dr Peter Mackovicky, professor at the department of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Minnesota, who has overlapped with Tucker in the field, says that while his personal competency is working with bones, he is unable to read the landscape like Tucker can.
He stands on these eroding hillslopes and he sees ancient landscapes.
“He’ll sort of stand there looking at the rocks. Maybe he will pop a little sediment in his mouth, to feel the grain size. He can actually paint you a picture of what that would have looked like to a degree that I can’t,” says Mackovicky. “He stands on these eroding hillslopes and he sees ancient landscapes.”
Inspiring the next generation
Walters says what was very special for him was that Tucker wasn’t just a supervisor to him. “He was a mentor.”
Tucker is a fantastic academic with a vast competency in his field, says Walters. But Walters also feels like “teaching is [Tucker’s] thing”, adding that sometimes Tucker takes a few fossils with him to schools to get the kids excited about palaeontology.
Tucker says that capitalising on the period of time that children are interested in dinosaurs is very important.
“In that sliver of time that they’re obsessed with dinosaurs – they look at biology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, botany, zoology. So, it’s all these disciplines that they get exposed to,” says Tucker.
Dr Ryan Tucker displaying an ammonite mollusk. They thrived in the seaways of the Cretaceous period and developed more intricate patterns on their shells, as they evolved to become more complex, says Tucker. “With some of the fossils, we are the first organisms to look at it for nearly 100 million years,” says Tucker. PHOTO: William Brederode
Many scientists in an array of fields use their excitement with dinosaurs as a “kind of gateway drug” into other fields of scientific inquiry, says Tucker.
Tucker is helping to facilitate a project where buckets of fossil rich sediment from North-Carolina are delivered to schools in the Western Cape. The sediment is processed by children from these schools, and the fossils they find are used by scientists interested in that time period.
Inspiring children is very rewarding, says Tucker. He is hoping to take his son with him to do some geological work when he can.
“He will go, and we’ll do this stuff up to the point that he hates it. And then he can do his own thing.”
Tucker’s son is just over a year and a half old, so he still has a while before he can take him into the field.
“But my hopes are high,” he says.