http://www.abqjournal.com/fleck/fleck3.htm
Rare Dino Skeleton Emerges From Rock
Published: 09-11-95
The Parasaurolophus' eye socket is beginning to emerge from the sandstone on
paleontologist Tom Williamson's laboratory workbench.
The 75 million-year-old dinosaur's sweeping crest, with much of the sandstone
chipped away, stretches four feet to the left of the skull across
Williamson's workbench on the second floor of the New Mexico Museum of Natural
History. It is this mysterious trumpet-like protuberance rising from the top
of the dinosaur's skull that makes the paleontologist's find unique.
Williamson grins. "It'll look classic as an exhibit specimen," he  says.
As he talks, he picks idly at the sandstone encasing the specimen with a
dentist's pick, his hands clearing the debris from the ancient bone.
Since Williamson and Robert M. Sullivan of The State Museum of Pennsylvania
unearthed the rare skull in a wilderness area near Farmington, Williamson
has been chipping away the sandstone that has enveloped the creature since
its death. When the scientists unveiled the rare find Aug. 25, it was little
more than a block of sandstone encased in plaster with a few bits of bone
showing through. Now the size and shape of the fossil is clear,
and Williamson is beginning to understand the scope of his find.
As only the second nearly complete Parasaurolophus skull known, it offers
scientists a chance to expand their knowledge of the creature, a
member of the Hadrosaur family of duckbilled dinosaurs, but with a
distinctive crest.  The Parasaurolophus, a plant-eating dinosaur,
wandered New Mexico when it was a coastal plain next to an ocean
stretching the length of the central United States.
Other Hadrosaurs have been found, but Parasaurolophus is made unique
by its crest, filled with some sort of air-carrying nasal cavity, the
purpose of which leaves scientists scratching their heads.
Williamson stood over the skull recently, using a copy of a 30-year-old
scientific paper to compare the skull with images of the other three
Parasaurolophus skulls found to date.
He ran his fingernails along small grooves in the bony crest -- apparently
where blood vessels ran -- and pointed to the crest's size, clearly
larger in diameter and straighter at the end than the previously discovered
specimens. As he talked, Williamson continued to chip away
at a pocket of sandstone in a bone hollow where a muscle was once above the
creature's cheekbone.
The scientist estimated that he has spent 25 hours working on the specimen
to remove the sandstone. He works with dental tools, including a small
metal pick and a whining dental drill.
So far, the work has been infused with the excitement of a new find,
and it has gone quickly as Williamson gouges away the large chunks of
sandstone around the skull. But the detailed, careful, fussy work of
getting the last bits of rock off of the skull will take months
-- through the winter, Williamson expects.
Only then can the scientific analysis begin -- measuring the find and
comparing it to the previously iscovered skulls to see what information
it will yiel===
http://www.abqjournal.com/fleck/fleck4.htm
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N.M. Scientists Find Phenomenal Fossil
 Published: 08-26-95
Two paleontologists, in what colleagues say is a rare and important find, this
week unearthed the skull of a duck-billed dinosaur called a Parasaurolophus in
Northwest New Mexico.  Wandering an ancient tropical coastal plain, the
Parasaurolophus apparently died and fell into water some 75 million years ago,
where it was covered by silt that preserved it until Robert M. Sullivan, with
The State Museum of Pennsylvania, found it two weeks ago. Sullivan returned to
the De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area south of Farmington this week with New Mexico
Museum of Natural History paleontologist Tom Williamson to unearth the
fossilized relic.  Yale University paleontologist John Ostrom, a
leading expert in the field, said the discovery offered a significant
contribution to understanding the rare Parasaurolophus.
"It's an interesting and important find," he said.
The skull is one of only two known relatively complete Parasaurolophus skulls
in the world, and one of only five or six fossils of the 75-million-year-old
dinosaur that have been found. Locked in a matrix of crumbling
75-million-year-old siltstone, the fossilized skull apparently emerged
recently as a result of erosion, and Sullivan saw a tiny piece of it as he
walked the area looking for signs of fossils.
"That's how you find dinosaurs," said Williamson. "You look for bone exposed
on the surface. There's no other way to find them."
The paleontologists uncovered enough of the skull at the site to tell what
they had, then encased it in plaster to protect it.
The entire rock was dug out and lugged to the Museum of Natural History
in Albuquerque, where it must undergo the painstaking process of removing
the rock and chemically preserving the fossil.
The skull appears virtually complete, they said, except for a piece of
cheekbone that was found nearby and also returned to the museum. 
"The preservation is exquisite," Williamson said.  The scientists
displayed the fossils, still encased in rock and plaster with only
small areas of bone showing, at the museum Friday morning.
Nearby, a life-sized model of a Parasaurolophus head looked out over the
museum's permanent display about New Mexico in the Cretaceous era -- 
the time when the dinosaur roamed what is now the state.
The fossils were found on federal Bureau of Land Management land, and
the scientists were careful to point out that the work was done with a
federal permit, without which it is illegal to collect fossils.
Parasaurolophus was a plant-eating dinosaur the size of a small elephant
that wandered what is now New Mexico and western North America when it
was a tropical coastal region, with an ancient ocean stretching across
what is now the Rocky Mountains from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic.
A member of a family of dinosaurs called hadrosaurs, Parasaurolophus
sports an exotic-looking horn sweeping up off the back of its head.
Scientists theorize the horn may have been used, trumpet-like, as a
sort of voice box.  During the late Cretaceous era, 75 million years
ago, Parasaurolophus would have been a common site in what is now
western North America, Ostrom said. Today there are few fossil
relics for scientists to look at to reconstruct what the animal
might have looked like and done -- which is what makes
the new find so important, according to Ostrom.
"If you want to understand the biology of the species, the animal
involved, you need to have a sample," he said.
Three other less well-preserved fragments of Parasaurolophus skeletons
have been found in New Mexico, two in the '20s and '30s and one possible
Parasaurolophus in the 1970s, Williamson said.
Several chunks of a Parasaurolophus crest -- the horn stretching back
from the head -- were found in Utah in 1979. But the only good fossil
in existence was found in 1922 in Canada and is now in the Royal Ontario
Museum.
 "This rivals that specimen," Sullivan said.  The two scientists plan to
write an academic paper on their find, and the fossil should be on
display at the New Mexico museum by some time next year.
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