MALTA — Two weeks ago, the fossil-rich badlands about 20 miles south of the Canadian border in northcentral Montana yielded yet another dinosaur, a 75-million-year old brachylophosaurus.
The duck-billed dino was nicknamed "Marco" by Steven Cowan, the young public relations coordinator for the Houston Museum of Natural Science who made the discovery in the same area where Leonardo, the mummified duck-bill, was found eight years ago.
In fact, Leonardo is now on loan to the Houston museum, and a contingent of paleontologists from Texas was on site in Montana preparing for a media tour when Cowan thought he saw bones sticking out of a rock outcropping on a hillside.
"It was exciting," said Cowan, a 22-year-old in his first year with the museum. "Mark (Australian paleontologist Mark Thompson now working with the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum) said they appeared to be ribs. He came back and found a scapula (shoulder bone) and a few other tendons showing in the rock.
"About 10 feet away, we found another bone jutting out of the rock," Cowan said. "Based on the position, the head may have fallen off and rolled down the hill, but we're hoping that the legs and torso are still in the stone."
The discovery — an unexpected first for Cowan — also surprised Bob Bakker, paleo curator at the Houston museum who was leading the expedition.
"One of the things we always need to watch out for is thinking that we know it all," he chuckled last week. "I knew enough never to go to a ridge top because you don't find specimens there.
"But I forgot to tell that to Steven," Bakker said, "so he did exactly that and proved me wrong."
Cowan made his discovery late in the afternoon of an unusually rainy day, and Thompson — cold, wet and hungry — was already walking toward the truck.
"I really didn't want to walk half a mile back to see it, but I did," said Thompson. "And I saw some tendons, vertebrae, ribs and a shoulder blade. It's a young brachylophosaurus. It didn't appear to be articulated (i.e., with bones connected together), but it may be complete."
The brachylophosaurus was a mid-sized member of the hadrosaurid family with a bony crest over the top of its skull and a drooping over lip. An adult could be 25 to 30 feet long. It grazed on vegetation, but with powerful back legs was probably able to stand erect to eat leaves from the trees.
When this dinosaur lived here in the late Cretaceous period, northern Montana was a swamp, complete with fish, turtles and crocodiles, said Bakker. "There is no evidence of frost here," he added.
"While there were plenty of crocodiles and turtles, there was only one common dinosaur: the brachylophosaurus," said Bakker. "This is something that suggests that a natural disaster wiped out other dinosaurs, and there was some lag time before other dinosaurs filled in.
"But that's my biggest mystery, why the other dinosaurs died out," he said. "I can't find any evidence of unusual droughts or flooding."
The badlands of Montana form a very unusual dinosaur boneyard, and Bakker is delighted to be part of such a fossil-rich area.
"There's a whole chorus of voices coming from this place," Bakker said last week. "Leonardo is the superstar, but he's surrounded by a whole constellation of stars."
Reach Tribune Projects Editor Eric Newhouse at 791-1485, 800-438-6600 or enewhouse@greatfallstribune.com
