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Date: 2/16/2022
HAMPSHIRE COUNTY – Mount Holyoke College geology professor Mark McMenamin and his wife Dianna were out and about on their 40th wedding anniversary and stumbled across something that would make the day even more memorable.
On that day last August, while on the UMass Campus, the pair came across the repaving project at the Newman Center parking lot. His wife, according to McMenamin, is always on the lookout for garden stones and spotting the torn up asphalt, she saw a theoretical gold mine of nice, rounded stones coming out from the ground.
“We went in there and we were looking at stones and loaded up a couple armloads, put them in the back of the car and drove back home,” said McMenamin. “People probably thought we were crazy while we were doing this.”
Arriving back at their home in South Hadley with 15 to 20 new stones in hand, they piled them outside to eventually go through. Later on, while splitting wood on a tree they had to cut down, McMenamin said following one of the blows from the axe, a rock rolled off a pile right toward his feet.
A paleontologist in addition to teaching geology, he said he noticed something off about the texture of the rock in question, comparing it to previously studied fossils he has seen. He took it inside to get under the light and have a closer look and realized his intuition was correct.
“I went inside and turned on the kitchen light and started looking at it and I go, ‘Oh my, that’s a piece of fossil bone, where did that come from,” said McMenamin.
Wanting to confirm what he thought he was seeing, in September McMenamin took a small chunk of the bone to the scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS) available within his Mount Holyoke lab and tested the piece of the fossil to see if his hunch was correct.
A scanning electron microscope provides detailed images of the surfaces of cells and whole organisms. The SEM and EDS analysis of the chunk revealed a software-identified phosphorus peak consistent with the identification of the sample as fossil bone.
“Our energy dispersive spectrometer ran a test on it and it had phosphorus in it so that was indicative of fossil bone particularly because it has a calcium peak that is also low. It is the same you would expect for a fossil bone,” McMenamin said.
Curious as to what creature’s fossil was at hand McMenamin began researching further into his findings. He came across a bit of luck in his research as he found a close match to a similar bone discovered in Antarctica.
“Although smaller in greatest dimension (8.5 cm versus 12. cm), the Antarctic bone is very similar to the Massachusetts partial right humerus and the distal diaphysis seems to have fractured in a nearly identical way,” McMenamin wrote in his Academia Letter titled “Large neotheropod from the Lower Jurassic of Massachusetts.”
He eventually identified the fossil as the distal (outer) end of the right humerus (long upper-arm) of a large neotheropod. Fossils of this dinosaur date back to the Lower Jurassic period, between 201 million and 174.1 million years ago.
“We’ve got a bone from the mysterious track makers that made all the footprints in this area,” McMenamin said.
He estimates the neotheropod was more than 9.4 meters (about 30 feet) long making it one of the largest land neotheropods of the Early Jurassic period. In his report he considers this creature specifically may have had an aquatic lifestyle and was able to swim and catch prey in the water, shown through trace fossils evidence that allows speculation that these animals may have fed on fish. The low density of the bone also suggests the aquatic lifestyle.
When talking about how typical these kinds of discoveries were in the area, McMenamin said the fossil scene in Western Massachusetts is under-appreciated because of the terrain. He added that there are most definitely many fossils still to be uncovered and that if there was more interest in digging, they would be discovered.