In the summer of 1942, a team from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History set out west to the Cretaceous rocks of the Hell Creek Formation in Montana to hunt for dinosaurs. The small team was led by Dr. David Dunkle, then a curator at the Museum. He was accompanied by his wife, Helena Dunkle, and a third member of the field party named Editha Davis. This field trip proved incredibly productive, with the team discovering three separate dinosaur specimens throughout the summer. One was a mostly complete skeleton of an Edmontosaurus, now on display in the Museum's Sears Dynamic Earth Wing; another was a partial skull of a Triceratops. But the most significant find was the skull of a medium-sized theropod dinosaur.
The theropod dinosaur skull that Dr. Dunkle discovered that summer was initially identified by Smithsonian Museum paleontologist Charles Gilmore as a new species of Gorgosaurus. But in 1988, it was described again by a team including Cleveland Museum of Natural History curator Dr. Mike Williams as a new genus and species, named Nanotyrannus lancensis. Since its discovery, Nanotyrannus has inspired decades of scientific debate around important issues in dinosaur paleontology, such as how to define a dinosaur species, the differences between juvenile and adult dinosaurs, and how different large predators could interact in the same ecosystem.
The gallery below features photographs of the expedition site as well as correspondence with Dr. David Dunkle.
