New Mexico natural history museum asks you to remember the Alamosaurus

Oct. 22—ALBUQUERQUE — Sure, the animatronic Bisti Beast — representing an alleged three tons and 70 teeth worth of carnivore — will immediately get your attention as it growls and moves its small claws in the lobby of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

But in prehistoric terms, that robotic roarer, designed to tell visitors to the museum they are going to have a lively time, has got nothing on one of the largest beasts to roam New Mexico during the Cretaceous period.

We're talking about the Alamosaurus, which could grow up to about 100 feet long and weigh up to 80 tons. The beast is considered a New Mexico original, since the fossils were discovered in 1921 in the badlands of the state's San Juan Basin.

Though perhaps not as well known as some of its long-necked cousins, the Alamosaurus was possibly the largest of all the long, big sauropods that once ruled the earth — and ate a lot of vegetation along the way.

The natural history museum, which opened in the mid-1980s, is putting a spotlight on this long-extinct prehistoric inhabitant of the state with the permanent exhibit Alamosaurus: A New Mexico Icon, which opened in March.

The animal's surprisingly small teeth, as well as a femur and foot, are on display, along with some colorful pictures of the beast and text boxes telling its tale, in a glass display case in the museum's Cretaceous Hall.

Call it a small shrine to a majestic behemoth — but one museum organizers hope folks take note of as they rush to the nearby displays of larger skeletons of mammoth reptiles.

There's no full skeleton of the Alamosaurus in any museum yet, as no Alamosaurus skull has been found anywhere, said Anthony Fiorillo, the museum's executive director. But you can tell by looking at the Alamosaurus fossils on display in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science that it was big.

Just compare your own foot to the fossil's foot, or your leg to the femur in the display, to figure out just how high it would tower over you if you happened to step into its shadow as it grazed. (Remember, it ate veggies, so it probably wouldn't gobble you up if it were still around.)

"It's not the longest, but it's certainly the biggest [dinosaur] on the New Mexico landscape," Fiorillo said in a phone interview while attending a convention of paleontologists in Ohio earlier this week.

Long interested in the Alamosaurus fossil discovery by geologist John B. Reeside, Jr. in 1921, Fiorillo — who took part in a more recent excavation of Alamosaurus remains in Big Bend, Texas, nearly 25 years ago — decided it was time to honor what he called "one of New Mexico's unique contributions to dinosaur paleontology.

"We hadn't told a story about a dinosaur that came from our own state," he said.

Reeside's discovery at the time was almost as big as the Alamosaurus, paleontologists say — because it proved that some 30 million years after the last of the sauropods were assumed to have died off on this continent, others somehow showed up in southwestern North America.

One theory: They were alive and well in South America and found a way north.

"South America is crazy rich with Alamosaurus's cousins and in order for Alamosaurus to get here, there must have been a land connection to South America," Fiorillo said.

Strangely enough, no one connected with the exhibition could say much about Reeside. An American Association of Petroleum Geologists journal piece from 1958 — the year Reeside died of a heart attack — called him the "foremost authority" of the "paleontology of the Western Interior region of the United States."

A biographical study by one of Reeside's colleagues, Carle H. Dane, published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1961, noted Reeside was a lifelong professional member of the U.S. Geological Survey and an authority on Cretaceous rock formations. Dane said Reeside was held in such high esteem by his colleagues that "three genera of fossils and at least 21 species were named in his honor by more than 20 different paleontologists."

Born in Baltimore, Md., in 1889, Reeside was apparently a decent public school student with an interest in chemistry who later took a geology course with paleontologist Charles K. Swartz, an "inspiring teacher" who, according to Dane, filled Reeside with enthusiasm for the profession. After pursuing a degree in geology at Johns Hopkins University, Reeside got a job with a field party of the Geological Survey in 1912.

He was detailed to a survey job in the San Juan Basin in 1915, mapping out coal beds "chiefly on horseback from tent camps established by wagons," Dane's article says. His work was interrupted by military service as a U.S. Army field artillery officer in World War I.

On a personal note, Dane notes Reeside had a good tenor voice, enjoyed collecting stamps and wore "scrubtoed shoes and battered hat" in the field.

But even Dane's extensive biography glosses over Reeside's discovery of the Alamosaurus fossils, noting he contributed to one of the most "indispensable" studies of the basin's Cretaceous formations but not mentioning the great big dinosaur who used to roam the area.

Paleontologist Charles Gilmore of the Smithsonian Institute gave the Alamosaurus its name because Reeside discovered the fossils near the Ojo Alamo trading post.

If there are mysteries surrounding Reeside, there are also many still revolving around the Alamosaurus. Did it roam in herds or alone? How did it digest anything with such small teeth? Did it have any real predators, given its mammoth size?

Fiorillo may have an answer to that last question, at least.

"Most likely once these dinosaurs achieved full size nothing bothered them," he said. "But the younger ones were at risk."

He said the mystery is part of the excitement of studying dinosaurs. The key takeaway from the paleontology conference he was attending, he said, was, "Here's what we don't know."

Meanwhile, his staff realizes many people may quickly bypass the Alamosaurus exhibition in favor of the nearby skeletal exhibition of a Seismosaurus fending off an attack from a smaller but more vicious predator.

There's room in the museum for both approaches, Matt Celeskey, curator of exhibits, said over the automated screech of prehistoric birds and the horn-echo sound of duckbill dinosaurs that sometimes drowned out snippets of dialogue.

"It's hard to compete with a moving, roaring robot," he said, referring to the Bisti Beast, "but there's room in a museum for all kinds of stories. There [are] the big displays that grab you as you walk through the front door and get families excited about what they are going to see. ... But there's also room in the space to tell the real fossil story."

The Alamosaurus, he said "was an animal that once walked New Mexico and no matter how many generations away they are, or how far apart we are on the family tree, we share a common experience of trying to move through this landscape and trying to find a way to survive."