Dr. Ken Lacovara isn't a typical professor by any means. A former jazz drummer, Lacovara found his calling in Paleontology with work that has placed him under the most extreme conditions, and he wouldn't have it any other way. Though you can find him teaching in biology classrooms on the various subjects of ecology and evolution, you are more likely to find him trudging through mud pits or digging up fossils with his students.
Lacovara's most recent research has been undertaken in a remote region of Patagonia, Argentina, where he and his colleagues discovered the fossilized bones of the world's second largest dinosaur in 2005. When alive, the 65 million year-old herbivore would have weighed more than 60 tons. He and Drexel students dug at the site for the next five years.
The 2007 excavation team. Back left to right: Jason Schein (grad student), Jason Poole (Dir. Dinosaur Hall, Acad. Nat. Sci.), Jessica Battisto (undergrad, '07), Dr. Ken Lacovara, Alison Moyer (undergrad, '08). Front left to right: Lucio Ibiricu (grad student), Victoria Egerton (grad student)
On May 1st of this year, after five weeks at sea, 16 tons of dinosaur bones encased in protective plaster arrived at the Packer Avenue Marine Terminal on the Delaware River in South Philadelphia, an event covered by the media.
It was an exciting moment when the container was opened; the find, after all, included nearly every type of bone of the dinosaur's skeleton, and Lacovara and his fellow paleontologists were thrilled to finally, after five years of hard work, have them in hand and soon in the lab for close study. Lacovara, his colleagues and Dean Donna Murasko—who called Lacovara "Drexel's Indiana Jones"—celebrated the occasion by toasting the bones with champagne.
ASK: Congratulations on your big find.
Ken Lacovara: Thank you.
ASK: What was the process between finding it and getting it up here? I'm sure it was pretty arduous.
KL: It's actually unbelievably complicated. It would take me days to recount every step of the process to you. The field work is really tough. We're out in very, very remote locations for two months at a time and we're about a hundred miles away from the nearest power grid location. We stay out there and work seven days a week and every couple weeks we go into town for a bite and take a shower, because basically we wake up early at 6:30, break rocks, haul buckets of rocks, have a meager lunch and then go back to breaking rocks and do that until seven or eight pm. And then we usually have a push up contest at the end of the night.
ASK: To see who has any strength left?
KL: Yeah, and then we go and collect firewood and water so we can make dinner and by the time we're done cleaning up dinner, which is usually just a piece of meat, then it's 10 or 11 at night, so we just climb in our tents and do it again the next day.
ASK: Are there ever any times you sit there and wonder: "What am I doing with my life?"
KL: No, I love being in the field. I never feel more alive or more effective than when I'm in the field.
ASK: Are there any aspects of the job you absolutely love or can't stand doing?
KL: I'm not that crazy about bureaucracy and paper work, and so the exportation process was very, very difficult. And I'd been working on the exportation permit for three years. My last trip to Argentina, I was down there for part of February and all of March [dealing with] bureaucracy. I didn't get out in the field at all [and just] spent the entire time dealing with the customs authority in Argentina to get this exportation done. That's not why anybody gets into science. So I could do without it.
ASK: I recently took a History of Science course, and our professor actually knew about your dig down in Argentina, because we were talking about Patagonia, and that's where Darwin was traveling through. So what is the Darwin link?
KL: Yeah, actually in 1834, Darwin, on the HMS Beagle, anchored in the mouth of the Rio Santa Cruz, which runs through Santa Cruz province where I [dig]. And he and Captain Fitzroy wanted to be the first Europeans to transit South America, although it's pretty narrow down there. So they set off in a couple of whale boats, and went up the river, dragging the whale boats with a crew for three weeks, and after about three weeks they ran out of food and had to turn back. But they were close enough that they could actually see over my field site and see the Andes and they were naming mountains in the Andes. And there's this giant, giant glacial lake that I work near, and they never knew it existed because it's around the other side of the hill, and they were naming peaks on the other side of the lake. So Darwin was very, very close to being in my field area, but didn't quite make it. He was about a day short.
Dr. Ken Lacovara excavates a dinosaur rib bone, 2006
KL: Well, we use very simple tools, because we're in such a remote location, so we have to use things that are hand powered and readily available. Basically we use shovels, picks, screw drivers, chisels, and brushes.
ASK: So are you guys broken off from communication a lot from the outside world?
KL: Yes.
ASK: So what happens if something goes wrong, or someone gets hurt?
KL: You know most of us are pretty experienced field people and most of us know some rudimentary first aid and fortunately we haven't had any serious mishaps. I've got a good crew and I don't think anybody is going to panic if anything happens. They can handle most of that stuff.
ASK: Do you ever have locals work with you, or are some of the locals against you guys working?
KL: I've had both. But I have a very good relationship with the locals down there. And from time to time I hire gauchos, which are South American cowboys, because sometimes I work in areas so remote that I can't use the 4-wheel drive there, so I'll use horses to take supplies in. I have used horses, pulling metal sleds, to take dinosaur bones out of there. Sometimes I've had to raft to locations.
ASK: Have you ever had any unsuccessful digs? Times you haven't found anything?
KL: I've never not come back without something.
ASK: Pretty good track record.
KL: Some are better than others, but I've never gone out where we haven't found fossils that we couldn't publish.
ASK: How do you know where to go, where to find fossils?
KL: We use the same formula that everybody uses in Paleontology. By now the whole world, to at least on a rough scale, is geologically mapped, so whatever country you're interested in, Argentina or Kazakhstan, you can find their geological survey, a geological map and see the ages of the rocks. Generally, you know, the Cretaceous is a pretty big period, and I need to know more resolution than that, but I can at least see if there are rocks of the Cretaceous age there. And then if you have rocks in the right age they have to be sedimentary rocks, because that's the only way to preserve a fossil, and they have to be sedimentary rocks deposited in the right environment. You can't find a dinosaur in a deep marine deposit; you can't find a dinosaur in a volcanic deposit. Basically, it has to be a river or a beach deposit to find a dinosaur. So if you have rocks of the right age in the right depositional environment than today, not then, but today, and an arid environment, where you get good rates of erosion and not too much plant cover, then new material is always being exposed at the surface. If you have those three things—rocks of the right age, the right environment and, today, a desert—you will find dinosaurs every time.
ASK: What do you think are the most common misconceptions people have about paleontology and dinosaurs?
KL: I've had well-educated people who were astounded to find out that dinosaurs were actually real, and I've had people who were pretty convinced that dinosaurs were still alive. And then the most common misconception is people confuse Paleontology with Archaeology. Archaeology is only for young things that involve humans, basically. Archaeologists deals with thousands of years and Paleontologists deal with millions, tens of millions of years. So usually if I'm at a cocktail party or something and say I'm a Paleontologist the next thing somebody wants to talk about is they saw some show about the Great Pyramids in Egypt – and I don't know anything about that. Not an Archaeologist.
ASK: I remember when Jurassic Park came out when I was in the 2nd grade and Paleontology was a big deal. We all wanted to dig up dinosaurs.
KL: Yeah, or people think my job is like Ross on Friends. I'm not sure what kind of a no show job he had, but that's not what it's like.
ASK: Now I understand you've been on digs elsewhere, including China. What were the finds like there, and how were the conditions different?
KL: Where we work the conditions are similar, so I feel very comfortable in the various field areas, because if you're in a remote region of the world that's a dessert, it kind of feels familiar. It's the cities that are bizarre and really different from one another. I've worked in the Bahariya Oasis of Egypt, which is a very remote region of Egypt, and I was part of a team that discovered what is currently the second largest dinosaur there, and we published that in 2001. The one that I just brought up here will be the new second largest dinosaur.
ASK: Is it a new species?
KL: Well, that remains to be determined. I think there's great potential for that, but we'll have to do the lab work before we can know. I've worked in the northwestern part of China on the edges of the Gobi Desert and there we found some very interesting fossil birds that were Cretaceous in age and they're essentially the oldest example of anatomically modern birds. And then I've done quite a bit of work in Wyoming and Montana looking at various dinosaurs there. We found a set of pterosaur tracks on a Jurassic beach in Montana and published on those. A pterosaur is like a flying reptile, like a pterodactyl. And recently I've begun to work on some issues involving the modes of preservation for tissues and cells of dinosaur bones. My colleague Mary Schweitzer, from North Carolina State University, has been successful in extracting actual tissue from dinosaur bones. And so now, I'm beginning to work with her on the problems of [figuring out] the chemical and sedimentological pathways that could lead from a living organism to actual organic material preserved for tens of millions of years.
ASK: Is there any chance that this recent find of yours contains tissue?
KL: It's possible, one of the things we'll be looking at. So, with this new dinosaur we're going to hit it at every angle. It'll probably produce a dozen or more publications based on this specimen. So we'll be looking at the traditional things: its osteology, its bone structure, to see who it is, who it's related to, etc. And also, because it's so complete, we can have a really good look at the bio-mechanics of it. So we'll be using this dinosaur to help us understand how super-massive creatures moved and walked, how they respired, how they controlled their body temperature. We'll be looking at pathologies that may be present in the bone to see what kind of a life this dinosaur had, was it injured a lot, did it have diseases. We'll be looking at the histology of the bones to see if we can discern a pattern of growth in the dinosaur, to maybe see how fast the dinosaur was able to obtain this super giant mass that it has. Some recent studies have indicated that super-massive dinosaurs can grow up to that size in 25 years, which is astounding.
ASK: I'm always amazed to think how lives for things that big were sustained. That's a lot of plants.
KL: It is. It is. It's tremendous. It strains the mind to think how you could eat enough to sustain a 60 ton body. But temperatures were very high at the end of the Cretaceous so there was a lot of productivity at the plant level. There was a lot of energy in the system, and if you have a lot of energy at the plant level, you can divide that up between many herbivores or fewer really, really big herbivores, and that's what happened in this case.
ASK: How did you wind up in Paleontology and in this field?
KL: Well, I got my Ph.D. from the University of Delaware. And I knew from the time I was in first or second grade that I wanted to be a geologist. I wrote an essay in second grade on why I wanted to be a Geologist. I described igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks and then I extolled the virtues of sedimentary rocks and explained why those were the best
ASK: I don't think most kids that age could pronounce those words.
KL: Probably not. So I followed that track with a slight detour in college, for music. I actually entered college as a music major. I'm a jazz drummer, and took a year in between my sophomore and junior year to be the house drummer at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City. But then I went back to school and got a Masters and Ph.D. So I started out in this field as a Geologist and I started looking at the environments of the dinosaurs, not the dinosaurs themselves. And I wanted to know about the ecosystems that the dinosaurs were living in, and the evidence that the dinosaurs were living in were contained in the sedimentary deposits. But it seemed like wherever I went, I found dinosaurs, and they're obviously interesting, so I started including more and more of the dinosaurs into my research, and now the dinosaur is most of my research.
ASK: How did you wind up at Drexel?
KL: I actually started teaching at Drexel in 1996, while I was a graduate student at University of Delaware, and so I would drive up here one night a week and teach a night class as an adjunct professor. And then in 2000, a geologist decided he was going to retire and I was hired as his interim replacement. I'd just gotten out of grad school and I thought it was a good job, but I was planning on looking elsewhere. My research in Egypt was going really well and the University liked it, and they offered me a tenure track position in 2002, which I took and I'm now a tenured professor here. I like it here very much, and so in my time at Drexel I've seen it go from a regional engineering school to a national comprehensive university of great esteem. I've really seen Drexel move in the right direction, so I feel like I got in on the ground floor of something.
ASK: I understand you take your students on digs to New Jersey.
KL: I do. We're fortunate here in that we have fossil-bearing Cretaceous deposits just a 20-minute drive away. The world's first dinosaur skeleton was found in Haddonfield, New Jersey—Hadrosaurous foulkii—in 1858. [After the discovery of] Hadrosaurous foulkii—there were no paleontologists yet—the best anatomists from all over the world were moving to South Jersey and setting up shop in Haddonfield and Camden, and all the marl pits, like Marlboro and Marlton, were being mined and producing these dinosaurs bones periodically [for ten years]. And then after that ten year period people found out there were many more dinosaurs in Wyoming and Montana and they all moved. So for about ten years South Jersey was the world capitol for dinosaur paleontology.
ASK: Most people would have no idea.
KL: Yeah. And those deposits are still there. All those marl pits have shut down, except for one, and we have access to it. Every time we go there we find fossils.
ASK: What kind of stuff do you find?
KL: Mostly crocodiles, like the one that's in the lobby of Stratton Hall. But we find fossil turtles, sometimes we find birds, we find some very interesting fish. We found a big fish, this giant thing called a Saber-Tooth Salmon, although there's a dispute [because] some people think it's a Saber-Tooth-Herring.
Jacketed bones, ready for transport. Left to right: Chris Coughenour (grad student), Jason Schein (grad student), Dr. Ken Lacovara, Lucio Ibiricu (grad student), Alison Moyer (undergrad, '08)
KL: Probably the best thing geology and paleontology does for humanity is help provide perspective. If you know geology, if you know the history of life on earth, it's pretty obvious that we're not the apex of evolution; we are an organism that has [not gone extinct]. But evolution and the history of life on earth doesn't run on a pathway that leads directly to humans. Humans are a branch on the tree. If you look at an oak tree and you put your finger on a little twig, you don't say that the entire tree grew to produce that twig, right? It's just one of the twigs on the tree. So I think it's very healthy for humanity to understand that we are, until recently, a very obscure and not particularly successful species. And in terms of time, we've occupied a very thin slice of time in the history of the planet. And the other thing of importance that paleontologists do, is that we study these fossil ecosystems that existed when the parameters of the ecosystem were different than today. In the case of the Cretaceous, the way that it was different is that it was warmer. CO2 levels were higher, sea levels were higher. So what does that sound like? Sounds like global warming, sounds like what we're headed into. So if we want to understand our future obviously we can only study things that have already occurred; you have to look to the past. If you want to understand the last time we had high temperatures, high CO2 levels and high sea levels, well, that's the Cretaceous. So this enhances our predictive ability to understand how ecosystems respond to the current global warming. Now the one thing that may be different in this case that, because of the anthropogenic inducement of the current event, is that it may be happening at a rate that is unprecedented in the fossil record. Basically we pumped all these green house gases into the atmosphere in the last 100 years. A 100-year interval doesn't even show up in the fossil record, so we're not sure really how the planet is going to respond based on the rate. But given enough time, what we do know is that ecosystems adapt, and they adapt in certain ways to climatic changes, and those certain ways they adapt can be predicted by looking at the fossil record.
ASK: Well, I think that's everything, unless there's something else you want to discuss.
KL: No, but I always want to emphasize the role of Drexel students in this project, and that I've had Drexel graduates and undergraduates in the field with me. In Patagonia they were there for the whole process of excavating this dinosaur over four years, and they've been very impressive. I said at the press conference the other day that considering how hard the conditions are and how remote the location is and how hard we work out there, not once in all that time has one of the students complained about the difficulty of the work, the living conditions or ever said that they want to go home early. They want the opposite actually.
ASK: Are there any opportunities, now with the bones being in Philadelphia, for Drexel students to work with what's going on?
KL: Yeah, I should tell you about what's going to happen to the fossils. Because it's so much material, I have to prepare them in more than one laboratory. So they'll be prepared in my lab here at Drexel, and also at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and some material I'm going to send out to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. So we will be looking for volunteers to learn fossil preparation. We will be selecting some people to volunteer and we'll be training them in fossil preparation, and then they can work in the laboratories along with me and the other scientists…Beginning probably by the first of June people can go to the Dinosaur Hall at the Academy of Natural Sciences…and see myself and my graduate students working on these fossils [in the fossil preparation lab].
ASK: How has Drexel, aside from providing students, helped your work, your research?
KL: I think in a lot of ways it would have been hard to do this project at any other University. Because Drexel has a very entrepreneurial spirit that allows people to take a seed of an idea and get the project started really fast and to run with it. And I don't have to run through a lot of red tape and bureaucracy to start a new project here; I can just do it. So I think that this kind of project really is well suited for this university. And also the thing that really benefits me is that Drexel's quarter system allows me to teach courses in the fall and in the spring, and to be—if I have to be—in a location in the winter. If I was locked into a traditional semester system where I could only do field work in our summer, I could never work in Argentina.
ASK: Any future digs on your mind?
KL: Well, I'll be going back to Argentina. Some of us on the Egypt project are talking about getting the band back together, and going back there next winter. I'll be going back to China, and there are some other spots I'm thinking about. I'll probably be going back to Montana this summer for some work.
ASK: Does your family travel with you when you go?
KL: My wife has been on some excavations in Egypt and Patagonia with me, but now that we have a young son, that won't happen for a few more years, but when he gets a few more years under his belt we're going to start taking him along, probably down to South America. It'd be great if he could spend part of the year down there, [maybe] learn Spanish. When he gets older he'll come on digs with daddy.
ASK: Pretty cool toys he gets to play with.
KL: Yeah, and my brother's a fireman!
The Cap San Lorenzo bearing 16-tons of dinosaur bones arrives at the Pack Avenue Terminal in Philadelphia after a 7,000 mile voyage from South America.
