15 February 2020 | New Scientist | 43a specific site, says Currie, because the
radioactive profile of the fossil and the
rocks it came from are likely to match up.
Further tantalising clues are emerging
that this species is part of a wide family
of waterfowl-like dinosaurs. Cau used
Halszkaraptor’s skeleton as a Rosetta stone to
show that two previously described Mongolian
dinosaurs, known only from fragmentary
skeletons, were close relatives. A South Korean
group is also studying the skeleton of another
new halszkaraptorine from Mongolia, reports
of which are yet to be published, and Godefroit
is studying another possible relative in China.
None of this would have come to pass if that
fossil had disappeared into a private collection
and Escuillié hadn’t brought it to Godefroit’s
attention. “There’s nothing like this animal
around and if it wasn’t for people trying to
get around this issue of poaching, we would
never see these fossils,” says Bell.
That gives a certain poignancy to the
next step in the dinosaur’s journey.
Godefroit will soon repatriate it, and
may fly alongside Escuillié to take it to
the Institute of Paleontology and Geology.
They are waiting for the call from the
Mongolian Embassy in Brussels. “If they
say to us, ‘Please send it to us next week’,
it’s OK. We can do it,” says Godefroit.
Much has changed in Mongolia since
Halszkaraptor was roughly extracted from
its rocks. In 2012, a poached Mongolian
Tarbosaurus – a relative of Tyrannosaurus rex –
was auctioned in New York for more than
$1 million. It caused an outcry among
scientists and Mongolian officials. In the
aftermath, the Tarbosaurus specimen and
a huge number of other smuggled dinosaurs
that had ended up in the US were impounded
and returned to Mongolia. They now fill
Ulaanbaatar’s old Lenin Museum, rebranded
the Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs.
“Despite having a wealth of fossils,
Mongolia never had a designated museum
for dinosaurs,” says Oyungerel Tsedevdamba,
the former Mongolian minister of culture,
sports and tourism, who helped to repatriate
the fossils in 2014. “If you saw how people
greeted Tarbosaurus bataar when it arrived
in Ulaanbaatar, you would understand how
important the restoration of cultural heritage
is to the Mongolian people.” ❚both Escuillié for rescuing the fossil and
pioneering palaeontologist Halszka Osmólska,
who led a series of Polish expeditions
to the Gobi desert starting in the 1960s.
One study published in November 2019
questioned whether the anatomical features
of the specimen really indicated it had
been semiaquatic. But most palaeontologists
have enthusiastically supported the idea.
Cau still has reservations that the team
was unable to precisely determine the
fossil’s provenance. But Currie and other
palaeontologists, such as Phil Bell at the
University of New England in Australia, have
been developing a technique that might help.
It uses the unique geochemistry of rocks andfossils to link specimens to their original
locations. Armed with handheld X-ray
fluorescence scanners, his team has been
recording the geochemical profiles of
sites such as Ukhaa Tolgod and comparing
these with the signatures of fossils known
to be from those sites.
That isn’t the only method that might
be useful. Fossils from this part of the Gobi
accumulate uranium, giving them unique
radioactive profiles. It might be possible
to use this to help pin Halszkaraptor toJohn Pickrell is a journalist
based in Sydney. He is the
author of Weird DinosaursDP
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It worked beautifully, delivering a pin-sharp
reconstruction of the entire fossil. Hidden
parts of the skeleton mirrored those on the
surface, making a strong case for it being
genuine. What made it watertight was the
discovery of a matching seam of increased
bone density, known as a line of arrested
growth, running through the whole skeleton.
The scan didn’t just prove that the skeleton
was legitimate, it showed it was even stranger
than Godefroit had thought. The animal had
stumpy, wing-like arms and many tiny conical
teeth. Those teeth and the long neck brought
to mind a fish-eating plesiosaur, says
Godefroit. Taken together, they suggest a
predator that spent much of its time in the
water, snapping up fish in Cretaceous lakes
and rivers. It probably used its unusual
forelimbs in the same way a penguin uses
its wings: to pull itself forward in the water.
It is hard to underestimate how odd that
is. Many giant reptiles lived in the seas at
the same time as the dinosaurs, but there
are only two other dinosaurs known to have
been highly adapted for swimming: a small
armoured dinosaur from China that led a
turtle-like lifestyle and the giant, fish-eating
carnivore Spinosaurus.
That did it. In 2017, Godefroit and his
collaborators, including Currie, Cau and
Tsogtbaatar, finally published a description
of the dinosaur in Nature, naming it
Halszkaraptor escuilliei. That honouredSmuggled fossils have often
surfaced at mineral shows in
Europe and the US“ Huge numbers of
smuggled dinosaurs
have been returned to
Mongolia from the US”