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Centennial of Russian Dinosaurs

November 05, 2002

A first collection of dinosaur bones was gathered in the Amur area a hundred years ago. The last year, palaeontologists completed the excavation of an entire well-preserved skeleton of a hadrosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous period. They made a nice present for themselves for the coming jubilee!

The skeleton was found in the southeast of the Amur region, near the village Kundur. Its first pieces were collected by workers, who were rebuilding a part of the highway Chita-Khabarovsk. Digging within the dinosaur cemetery was initiated by specialists from the Amur Institute of Integrated Research of the Far East Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FED RAS) in Blagoveshchensk. Later, they were joined by scientists from other scientific institutes: Paleontological Institute RAS (Moscow), Zoological Institute RAS (St. Petersburg), Institute of Biology and Soil Sciences FED RAS (Vladivostok), and the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences (Brussels, Belgium). The hadrosaur skeleton was found by palaeontologists on the Kundur site in 1999, and it took them three years to dig it out.

Hadrosaurs were vegetarians, about 11 m long, with big hind and small fore limbs. They had elongated flattened jaws resembling a duck`s bill (for which they are also called "duckbill dinosaurs"). The cranium of some hadrosaur species was decorated with a bony outgrowth. The dinosaur from the Kundur site had a very big outgrowth pointed upwards and towards the back, which makes this specimen different from other known hadrosaurs. Therefore, the palaeontologists consider it as a new species. Its description will soon appear in scientific editions.

This year, the scientists continued excavations in Kundur and added several items to the collection of fossil bones, which comprises remnants of the Late Mesozoic turtles and crocodiles, but mostly of dinosaurs. Besides the fossils of hadrosaurs, palaeontologists found bones of ankylosaurs (plant-eating dinosaurs armoured with rows of bony plates) and of small and large predators including relatives of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex. By the present time, the excavation works have exposed about a hundred of square meters of the surface. The scientists suppose that buried fossil bones are scattered over an area of several thousands of square meters.

The fossils found in the Amur region are from 68 to 70 million years old. At that time, rainstorms and earthquakes often caused catastrophic mudflows that came down to the large Amur-Zeya depression from the surrounding mountain slopes. Many animals lost their life in those mudflows, and their bones were accumulated in the river valley. Some scientists believe that dinosaurs of the Amur region were the last ones among those, who lived in Asia.

Giant ancient reptiles became familiar to people in the first quarter of the 19th century, when their remnants were found in England for the first time. The word "dinosaur" came in use from 1841. By the early 20th century, scientists knew more than a hundred of dinosaur species. As for dinosaurs within the territory of Russia, only one good thing about them was their absence, as aptly said Professor O. Marsh from the United States.
   
However, in 1902, bones of a giant animal were found on the right side of the Amur by fishermen, who came from a kazak village located on the left side of the river. The news immediately appeared in the Amur Gazette (Priamurskie vedomosti). The same year, the site of unusual finding was visited by amateur archaeologist A.Ya. Gurov, who gathered a collection of fossil bones and gave it to the Natural History Museum in Blagoveshchensk. In 1916 and 1917, a special expedition organized by the Russian Geological Committee worked at the site called Belye Kruchi. In 1925, a duckbill dinosaur excavated by that expedition was described by palaeontologist A.N. Ryabinin as a "manchuriasaur". In the late 1940s, another burial of dinosaurs was discovered in the western part of town Blagoveshchensk. In the 1980s, palaeontologist Yu.L. Bolotskii began to dig at this site. Here he found and described a previously unknown dinosaur - amurosaur. Like manchuriasaur, it belongs to the genus Hadrosaurus.

At the present time, dinosaur burials are known in many places in Russia. Besides the Amur region, they occur in several other points in Asia: Yakutia, Sakhalin, Trans Baikal region, and in the South Siberia (Kemerovo Oblast and Krasnoyarsk Territory). In the European part of Russia, bones of Mesozoic monsters are found in Povolzh`e, Belgorod, Kursk, and Moscow areas. However, by the quality and amount of findings, the Amur region still remains the leading supplier of dinosaur fossils in our country.

Informnauka (Informscience) Agency