Student's Dino Discovery

What can the lowly student contribute to the big wide world of science? We find out as Steve Brusatte, the man who made one of last year’s “biggest” dinosaur discoveries, talks to Null editor, Hayley Birch.

You might imagine that in science, all the exciting discoveries, all the really meaty pieces of research, are handed to the top dogs – the furrowed browed professors and stroky chin people – leaving the underlings, and the students, to feed off the scraps. Not so. Occasionally a big juicy bone is thrown to one of the little guys.

And in Steve Brusatte’s case, it literally was a bone. Or at least, some fossilised bones.

Steve the dino guy

Brusatte, a masters student in palaeobiology at the University of Bristol, was given a bunch of unidentified dinosaur bones from the Republic of Niger by one of his superiors, Paul Sereno. “They were just sitting around his lab for a while, waiting for somebody to work on them,” says Brusatte. “Paul suspected that they were a new species and handed them off to me for study.”

Not only did Sereno’s old fossils, which had been hanging around since 1997, come from a previously unidentified dinosaur – now christened Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis – this monster was one of the largest species of carnivorous dinosaur ever to have stalked the Earth. At between 13-14 metres long, it was bigger even than T.rex.

But that’s not what’s interesting about the discovery, says Brusatte. “To be honest the size of this animal is neither new nor unexpected. We knew that the Carcharodontosaurus genus and its close relatives were large.”

What is important is that the new species had its home in a different region of Africa to some of its relatives, showing that shallow seas present around the time Carcharodontosaurus was alive promoted evolutionary diversification. “There is an obvious parallel to our modern world of high temperatures and rising sea levels,” says Brusatte. “The new species doesn’t tell us much specifically about global warming, but larger studies of these Northern African ecosystems are exactly the type of work needed to understand how our modern world may change.”

Wise words from one so young. And proof that you don’t have to have a beard to make sense of science.

A quick bit of research has revealed a whole host of students not just cleaning test tubes:

In 2002, second year undergraduates on a field course in the Seychelles found a new species of spider in their insect traps.
A year earlier, students had discovered seven new species in a Bolivian forest – two species of frog, snake and toad, and a previously unknown lizard.
In 2000, three high school students, aged between 16-18, discovered a neutron star by looking at data from NASA and the National Science Foundation. The region the star was found in had already been closely studied by astronomers who had failed to come up with anything.
Just last year, a couple of teenagers undermined GSK's claims that "the blackcurrants in Ribena have four times the vitamin C of oranges" by carrying out some simple lab experiments. Their accusations ended in 15 charges of misleading advertising (check it out).
In 1929, Louis de Broglie became the first person to be awarded a Nobel Prize for a PhD thesis, in which he described the wave-like nature of matter, now a fundamental concept in quantum physics (check it out).