Moore became immediately interested and began to search the rock face for more fragments. He and his parents soon discovered that the bones belonged to a dinosaur skeleton buried beneath the rock outcropping.
Not only did the discovery double the number of dinosaur bones found in Idaho, but the dinosaur turned out to be a new species entirely. Further excavations revealed the specimen to be a type of nodosaur, an armored dinosaur that walked on four legs, had a clubbed tail and lived during the mid-Cretaceous period, Moore said.
Moore, now a professor at the UNM Honors College, is working with a former student from Dartmouth College to publish a scientific description of the nodosaur so that it can be formally named. It is one of several projects he has worked on involving dinosaur excavations in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota and other areas of the world, including India and Uruguay.
Moore has been a researcher since attending Cambridge, but he said he had been interested in science from an early age.
“My parents spent a lot of time when I was a small child taking me to some of the amazing science museums in London near to where I grew up, and that really sparked an early interest in me,” he said.
When he was 5 years old, Moore spent 18 months trying to convince his parents to take him on a fossil-hunting trip in the southern United Kingdom, he said.
“When they finally acquiesced, the bug had taken hold,” he said.
While he remained interested in science over the years, Moore said he did not retain an interest in geology or paleontology. At age 16, when students in the United Kingdom typically choose an academic specialty, he intended to study physics and chemistry.
“One of my friends peer-pressured me into taking geology instead of physics, and I’m eternally grateful because it relit that fire,” Moore said.
He received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Cambridge before moving to the United States to conduct postdoctoral research at schools such as Dartmouth and Texas A&M University. This research led him to the hillside in Idaho where he discovered the species of nodosaur.
Moore said he and a colleague began research in 2003 on outcrops of rock that are not known for containing many fossils, but come from periods of time that many paleontologists are interested in.
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“The good thing is, these rocks aren’t really well-known,” he said. “If you find an organism there it’s likely to tell us something new about the time period.”
Moore’s research concerns several subfields of paleontology and geology, but he said one of his primary focuses is paleoecology, the study of how fossils can be used to reconstruct the ecosystems the animals lived in.
“I’m working on a few different research projects aimed at understanding how ecosystems respond to major changes in the geological record like mass extinctions, big climate changes or the introduction of new sets of species,” Moore said.
He said the mass extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period is not only among his main areas of research, but remains among the most controversial topics in paleontology today.
The extinction, which occurred about 65 million years ago, is typically attributed by scientists to climate change caused by a combination of increased volcanic activity in India and an asteroid impact near Chicxulub, Mexico.
“There’s still no solid scientific consensus as to how we can explain this pattern of extinction,” Moore said.
He said he wants to understand why certain species were much more impacted — or even wiped out — during the extinction while others were not strongly affected.
“From a wider perspective, answering the riddle of the dinosaur extinction ... has clear implications for understanding the effects of major environmental perturbations on organisms and ecosystems,” said Stephen L. Brusatte in his book “Dinosaur Paleobiology.”
In fact, Moore said this field of study may have major implications in the way humans deal with future environmental changes.
“This could be important for understanding how the current anthropogenic climate change could influence ecosystems,” he said.
His goals for future research are to study other areas of the globe to learn why certain fossils are present in certain areas and not others, despite their having similar physical environments at the time the animals lived. He said he wants to bring a unique perspective to paleontology and studying past natural events.
“It’s very easy to view paleontology as a series of dusty old bones mounted in a museum, but every single fossil that you pick up was once a living, breathing or photosynthesizing organism that interacted with its environment, grew and reproduced,” Moore said. “Putting a living perspective on some of these is, for me, really important.”
He said that while scientific research is competitive and challenging, making new discoveries is extremely rewarding.
“It’s been one of the greatest pleasures in my life, doing science and finding out these nuggets of information about the way that the world works that nobody else has ever thought of,” Moore said.
Lena Guidi is a freelance reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
