Dale Alan Russell (1937-2019): Voyageur of a Vanished World

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Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences

Journal: Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences

Manuscript ID cjes-2020-0163.R1

Manuscript Type: Tribute

Date Submitted by the 26-Nov-2020 Author:

Complete List of Authors: Cumbaa, Stephen L.; Canadian Museum of Nature, Currie, Philip J.; University of Alberta, Biological Sciences Dodson, Peter; University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Biomedical Sciences; University of Pennsylvania, DepartmentDraft of Biomedical Sciences Mallon, Jordan; Canadian Museum of Nature

Keyword: Dale Alan Russell, biography, dinosaurs, mosasaurs, extinction, evolution

Is the invited manuscript for consideration in a Special Tribute to Dale Russell Issue? :

1 Dale Alan Russell (1937-2019): Voyageur of a Vanished World

2 Stephen L. Cumbaa1, Philip J. Currie2, Peter Dodson3,4, Jordan C. Mallon1,5,*

4 1Beaty Centre for Species Discovery and Palaeobiology Section, Canadian Museum of Nature,

5 P.O. Box 3443, Station D, Ottawa, ON K1P 6P4, Canada

6 2University of Alberta, CW 405, Biological Sciences Building, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E9, Canada

7 3Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary

8 Medicine, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

9 4Department of Earth and EnvironmentalDraft Science, School of Arts and Sciences, University of 10 Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

11 5Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, 2115 Herzberg Laboratories, 1125 Colonel

12 By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada

14 *Corresponding author

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16 Abstract

17 We review the distinguished and varied career of our friend and colleague,

18 palaeontologist Dr. Dale A. Russell, following the recent news of his death. Dale relished his

19 work, and approached his research—whether it be on mosasaur systematics, dinosaur extinction,

20 or the evolution of animal intelligence—with great gusto. A deep and contextual thinker, Dale

21 had a penchant for metanarrative rarely equaled in these times of increased research

22 specialization. This quality, combined with his outgoing and collaborative nature, allowed Dale

23 to make friends and colleagues with highly varied research interests throughout the world. We

24 remember Dale fondly, and cherish the opportunity to share the stories of his adventures (and

25 misadventures) across the globe.

26 Draft

27 Key words: Dale Alan Russell, biography, dinosaurs, mosasaurs, evolution, extinction

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28 Introduction

29 Dale Alan Russell (Figure 1) died on December 21, 2019, six days short of his 82nd

30 birthday. Dale was the first modern student of Canadian dinosaurs, revitalizing their study

31 following the fabled decades of collection by Charles M. Sternberg and his contemporaries.

32 During his 30-year tenure at the Canadian Museum of Nature (previously the National Museum

33 of Canada, and the National Museum of Natural Sciences), he described dinosaurs from Canada,

34 China, North Africa and elsewhere. He sought to understand both the dinosaurs themselves and

35 the environments in which they lived. His restless energy drove him to explore remote regions of

36 the earth, from the Canadian High Arctic, to the New Caledonian cloud forest, from the High 37 Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the RiftDraft Valley of the Lake Turkana region of northern Kenya, 38 to the deserts of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia in China. He endeavoured to understand dinosaur

39 habitats by exploring modern analogues to Cretaceous lowland habitats in Florida, Louisiana,

40 and North Carolina, where he documented swamp cypresses, magnolias, turtles and alligators in

41 their natural habitats. He was among the first palaeontologists to give serious consideration to an

42 extraterrestrial cause of dinosaur extinction (Russell and Tucker, 1971), nearly a decade before

43 the Alvarez hypothesis gained traction. Dale is remembered not only for his fertile imagination,

44 his becoming modesty, and his nearly manic sense of humor, but also for his enthusiasm on

45 matters botanical. Not only did he learn about his fungi and plants of interest (mushrooms, figs,

46 ferns, etc.), but he cultivated them both at home and in the office, consumed them, and induced

47 his friends and co-workers to consume them (fiddlehead fern soup, anybody?). He is

48 remembered with great affection by all who knew and admired him. Some reflections and

49 cherished memories of Dale are provided in Supplementary Data 1.

50 Early Years

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51 Dale was born on December 27, 1937 in San Francisco. He was the second of three

52 children of Clarence R. and Marion C. Russell (Figure 2). Ten years Dale’s senior, his older

53 brother, Donald Eugene, is a distinguished mammalian palaeontologist (recipient of the Romer-

54 Simpson Medal of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2005) who has spent most of his

55 career in France, where he now resides. His younger sister Dian Patricia was born in 1940. The

56 family moved to a 40-acre farm in Enterprise, Oregon in 1943. Brother Don remembers Dale’s

57 youthful interest in dinosaurs, which he never outgrew. He tells of a young Dale crafting a small,

58 wooden stegosaur, with unmistakable plates along its back.

59 Dale matriculated at Eastern Oregon College in La Grande, but a year later transferred to 60 the University of Oregon in Eugene. HereDraft he was mentored by J. Arnold Shotwell, a pioneer of 61 taphonomy, with whom he worked for several summers in the rich Oligocene fossil beds of

62 southeastern Oregon, also with a foray into Idaho (Figure 3). Dale graduated from the University

63 of Oregon in June 1958 and began a master’s program in palaeontology at the University of

64 California, Berkeley. During his time at Berkeley, Dale participated in field work in California,

65 Nevada, Wyoming, and Baja California. He received his master’s in palaeontology from UCB in

66 June 1960. His thesis (unpublished), supervised by Don E. Savage, was on fossil mammals of

67 Palaeocene-Eocene age from northwestern Wyoming. He published his first paper (of many; full

68 bibliography available in Supplementary Data 2) on an Oligocene insectivore from Montana

69 (Russell, 1960). Dale entered the Ph.D. program at Columbia University under the supervision of

70 Edwin H. Colbert in September, 1960. The topic of his dissertation was a review of the

71 mosasaurs of North America. The years at Columbia were pivotal for a number of reasons. Of

72 course, they resulted in a Ph.D. in short order (awarded January, 1964). Two other events stand

73 out that affected the rest of his life: his conversion to Roman Catholicism at Easter, 1961, and his

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74 meeting Janice Alberti in front of the Law School on the Columbia campus in October 1962.

75 Janice became his wife on July 18, 1964. She also became Dr. Janice Russell, Ph.D. in May

76 1977, with a history degree from Columbia.

77 In 1964, Dale began a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University, supervised

78 by John H. Ostrom. While there, he published his first mosasaur paper (Russell, 1964), on

79 intracranial kinesis, indelibly marking him as a specialist in the anatomy of Mesozoic reptiles.

80 He also began the laborious process of turning his dissertation into a museum monograph

81 (Russell, 1967).

82 Establishment in Ottawa

83 Dale had the extraordinary goodDraft fortune of landing a curatorial position in the National 84 Museums of Canada, in what quickly became the National Museum of Natural Sciences (NMNS,

85 now the Canadian Museum of Nature [CMN]), and moved to Ottawa in January 1965. Moves to

86 Ottawa, one of the coldest national capital cities in the world, in the month of January, are not

87 necessarily recommended, but Dale embraced the opportunity. He became heir to one of the

88 greatest collections of Cretaceous dinosaurs in the world, built up by Lawrence M. Lambe,

89 Charles H. Sternberg and his three sons, and Wann Langston, Jr. Chief among these, however,

90 was Charles M. Sternberg, who at age 80 still visited the palaeontology lab with regularity, both

91 then and for many years thereafter. The lab was then located in an annex at Sussex Drive and

92 George Street in the ByWard Market, less than 1 km from Parliament Hill. The wooden floors of

93 the massive roughhewn limestone building creaked, and the collection room was allegedly

94 haunted by the ghost of Lambe, who surprisingly was also reported when the lab and collection

95 moved in the fall of 1968 to an industrial park in the west of Ottawa on Woodward Drive.

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96 Dale jumped into his new position with gusto. By summer (June–July 1965), he was

97 already in the Arctic (Northwest Territories) collecting Cretaceous vertebrates along the

98 Anderson River in shallow marine deposits, recovering a Niobrara-like fauna of mosasaurs,

99 plesiosaurs, and toothed birds (Russell, 1967). He did make a point of returning to Ottawa for the

100 birth of his son Frank on August 26. In January 1966, he visited the Royal Ontario Museum in

101 Toronto to investigate their fine collection of Canadian dinosaurs, collected principally by

102 William A. Parks and Levi Sternberg. In May, he was off to London and Brussels, still chasing

103 down mosasaurs. During the summer, he made his first visit to the Red Deer River badlands of

104 the Edmonton Group in Alberta, and explored deposits along the Horton River in the Northwest

105 Territories. While on the Horton River, Dale was prospecting with palaeoichthyologist David

106 Bardack on July 13. Characteristically, DaleDraft was 200 meters ahead over the next hill. Bardack, in

107 attempting to catch up, suddenly found himself between a yearling caribou and a barren ground

108 grizzly bear sow and her two cubs. Because the bear was advancing towards him and he was

109 unarmed, he ran. The bear caught up to him, grasped him gently by the elbow, flung him aside,

110 and ambled off with its cubs. Bardack suffered only a puncture and abrasions at the elbow

111 (Bardack, 1967). It was all over before Dale knew what had happened.

112 The following year, 1967, was a big one for Dale and a big one for Canada, the

113 centennial celebration of Confederation. There was no fieldwork that summer, perhaps in

114 anticipation of the birth of twin daughters Maria and Elizabeth. On the publication front, this

115 year saw Dale’s Ph.D. dissertation on mosasaurs released as a now-classic monograph (Russell,

116 1967), which marked Dale as the leading world expert on this important group of Cretaceous

117 marine reptiles. In it, he coined the first of several taxonomic names that he would over his

118 career (Appendix 1). According to Google Scholar, this publication has been cited 429 times

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119 until the moment of this writing (his most cited so far). The same year marked his debut as a

120 student of Canadian dinosaurs, with two important publications as Natural History Papers of the

121 National Museum of Canada: one an ambitious census of dinosaur specimens collected in

122 western Canada (Russell, 1967), and one on the biostratigraphy of dinosaurian and microfossil

123 faunas of the Edmonton beds, the latter written with T. Potter Chamney of the Geological Survey

124 of Canada (Russell and Chamney, 1967). Staying put in Ottawa that summer enabled Dale to

125 hire both permanent staff and to take on summer students. Gilles Danis was hired and trained as

126 a preparator by senior preparator Harold (“Hank”) Shearman. Danis soon proved to be an

127 immense asset, skilled in many practical talents, including casting and welding, invaluable to the

128 forthcoming renovation of NMNS exhibits. He became an expert in skeletal mounts. The three

129 students were Gerald (“Gerry”) Fitzgerald,Draft who eventually worked for 30 years in the collections

130 of the Museum; Malcolm J. Heaton, who earned his Ph.D. at McGill with Robert L. Carroll

131 before becoming a curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum until his untimely death in 1984; and

132 dinosaur enthusiast Peter Dodson. Dale mentored Dodson, and proposed a summer project on

133 lambeosaurine hadrosaur ontogeny that eventually became a chapter of his Ph.D. dissertation at

134 Yale (Dodson, 1975). In 1968, Dale taught a systematic course in vertebrate palaeontology at the

135 University of Ottawa, eagerly attended by Dodson. Dale introduced C. M. Sternberg’s

136 magnificent map of dinosaur quarries at Dinosaur Provincial Park (Sternberg, 1950) and

137 proposed the project that became Dodson’s master’s thesis at the University of Alberta (Dodson,

138 1971).

139 Dale took to the field with Danis in 1968, visiting the Peace River Canyon in British

140 Columbia, and then came to Dinosaur Provincial Park in July for a reconnaissance in these

141 richest of dinosaur beds, where it is impossible to walk 100 meters without treading on dinosaur

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142 bone. He and Danis camped across a small ditch from newlywed Dodson and his bride Dawn.

143 Many a camp meal was shared, marshmallows roasted, and stories told. Two frequent visitors

144 were Jane Colwell, a palaeontologist employed by Richard C. Fox, Dodson’s soon-to-be

145 master’s advisor, who was collecting fossils in the Steveville region of the Park; and Hope

146 Johnson, a brilliant, imaginative, and energetic amateur palaeontologist. Colwell fell in love with

147 Danis right under the oblivious Dale’s nose. (“So that is why she comes around camp so often!”)

148 Johnson’s visits were always welcomed, as she often brought fresh baked goods such as

149 blueberry muffins, cornbread with honey, and strawberry-rhubarb pie. She also brought

150 interesting fossils in small boxes, and a knowledge of local collectors, particularly Irene

151 Vanderloh (Tanke 2010), who collected parts of an intriguing small theropod dinosaur.

152 Introductions were made, Dale was takenDraft to the spot, and a partial skull and skeleton of a very

153 important sickle-clawed troodontid, Stenonychosaurus, was recovered. Danis, of course, did the

154 dirty work of digging, plastering, toting and ultimately preparing, while Dale described the

155 specimen (Russell, 1969). This was the first in a series of publications on Alberta theropods:

156 dromaeosaurids (Colbert and Russell, 1969); tyrannosaurids (Russell, 1970a) and ornithomimids

157 (Russell, 1972) that marked him as a major student of Canadian theropods. In his analysis of

158 Stenonychosaurus, he drew special attention to the size of the brain cavity, which unlike other

159 dinosaurs or typical reptiles, left a deep impression on the frontal and parietal bones of the skull

160 roof. He estimated the endocranial volume at 49 cm3. Based on the circumference of the femur,

161 he estimated the body mass as comparable to that of cassowaries and emus, about 45 kg. He thus

162 figured that the volume of the brain was about seven times the estimated brain volume to body

163 weight of an alligator of equivalent weight. This modest but imaginative tour de force ultimately

164 inspired several generations of investigations and that ever popular work of fiction, Jurassic

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165 Park. To be very clear, although small theropods such as Dromaeosaurus, Oviraptor and

166 Velociraptor were described qualitatively as possessing large brains, it was explicitly

167 Stenonychosaurus and not the others that supported the determination of the large

168 encephalization quotient that Michael Crichton used to such great effect in Jurassic Park, even

169 though he erroneously attributed chimpanzee-like intelligence to Velociraptor, actually based on

170 Deinonychus. The Stenonychosaurus paper continues to be cited, 12 times in the last three years,

171 according to Google Scholar.

172 Administrative duties were not Dale’s favourite, but serving as Chief of the museum’s

173 Palaeobiology Division from 1969–1982 allowed him to lobby for and strategically build a small 174 multidisciplinary research team well-equippedDraft to take on individual and collaborative projects 175 with reasonably large scope, supported by a small shared team of research and collections

176 assistants, a preparator, and volunteers. Foremost among his in-house collaborations were those

177 with ecologist Pierre Béland and palynologist David M. Jarzen, both of whom Dale had hired.

178 Béland and Dale collaborated gleefully on a number of projects, most successfully on

179 “Paleoecology of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, interpreted from the distribution of

180 articulated vertebrate remains” (Béland and Russell, 1978). This paper is a rich synthesis that

181 started with the census (Russell, 1967), but incorporated sedimentologic, taphonomic,

182 biogeographic, and biostratigraphic data, and rigorous statistical analysis. Dale, Jarzen and

183 Béland actually traveled to Luanga National Park in Zambia to observe first-hand the effects of

184 dense populations of large vertebrates in a living tropical flood-plain community. The analysis

185 was so thorough that they even reported erosion rates and calculated the rate of exposure of new

186 skeletons in Dinosaur Park, inferring a complete turnover of specimens in 250 years.

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187 The great enterprise of the 1970s was the remounting of specimens and the emplacement

188 of a new dinosaur gallery (called “Life through the Ages”), which opened to the public in 1974.

189 It was here that Dale was able to air his fresh ideas about dinosaurs and their ecological setting.

190 To this end, Gilles Danis did a brilliant job of mounting skeletons among a medley of live ferns,

191 palms, and creeping vines. In conjunction with the new exhibit, Dale researched and wrote a

192 beautiful book, A Vanished World, the Dinosaurs of Western Canada (Russell, 1977). In

193 preparing the book, Dale hired fine artist Ely Kish, who collaborated with Dale to produce a

194 series of vivid, beautiful images of dinosaurs in their natural habitats, with advice from David

195 Jarzen on the rich Cretaceous flora. Kish worked with Dale breathing over her shoulder. She

196 modeled skeletons in clay, and then added muscles and skin, and illuminated the sculptures in

197 various poses to get light, shadows, andDraft reflections just right (Russell, 1987). The resulting

198 artwork is quite stunning. The book was also enhanced by the botanical photography of Suzanne

199 Swibold, documenting plants from the southern United States that are similar to those from the

200 Cretaceous of western Canada. Russell and Kish renewed their fertile collaboration for the next

201 book, An Odyssey in Time, the Dinosaurs of North America (Russell, 1989), with superb photos

202 by photographer Harry Foster. A few years later another Russell and Kish project launched, The

203 Tiny Perfect Dinosaur series. This was a very popular series of model kits for younger children

204 that each came with a 32-page book, a poster, and a large plastic ‘egg’ containing an accurate,

205 scale model snap-together plastic skeleton. The first three books in the series were co-authored

206 with John Acorn, and the remainder with Jennifer Glossop; Richard Day provided research

207 support for the venture. The books in The Tiny Perfect Dinosaur series sold more than a million

208 copies in the United States and Canada, and intact ones are collector’s items.

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209 As Dale grew more comfortable in his knowledge of Canadian dinosaurs, he expanded

210 his focus. Beginning in the 1970s, he turned his attention to faunal composition and turnover, the

211 K-Pg boundary phenomenon and potential extraterrestrial causes of extinction. He considered

212 supernovae (Russell and Tucker, 1971), solar flares (Béland and Russell, 1976), and other

213 cosmic catastrophes, a theme that occupied his mind for several decades (Russell, 1979, 1982,

214 1984, 1996; Russell and Dodson, 1997). Significantly, Dale convened two international

215 workshops in Ottawa on the Cretaceous-Tertiary (as it was then known) extinctions and possible

216 terrestrial and extraterrestrial causes. The proceedings of K-TEC I and II, as they were called,

217 were each published in the Syllogeus series of the NMNS (Roy and Russell [eds.], 1977; Russell

218 and Rice [eds.], 1982). The idea of an extraterrestrial catastrophe came to the fore in 1980, with

219 the recognition of the iridium anomaly inDraft Gubbio, Italy, and subsequently in Denmark, the

220 Caribbean and elsewhere by the Alvarez team. Dale was literally a man ahead of his time.

221 In January 1979, Dale consulted with NASA at their Ames, CA facility, and came back in

222 June of that year to a conference they hosted on ‘Life in the Universe’. In the early 1980s, and

223 again in the early 1990s, Dale presented aspects of his research in themed meetings and

224 symposia on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, at the UNESCO sponsored SETI (Search for

225 Extraterrestrial Intelligence) meetings in Paris and later at Santa Cruz, CA, at the Lunar and

226 Planetary Science Institute/NASA meetings in Houston, and in Ottawa with Canada’s Committee

227 on Space Research. His value to the academics from other disciplines involved in the exploration

228 of extraterrestrial worlds was simple. For years through a collaborative, multidisciplinary

229 approach, Dale had been studying a long-vanished world and its interconnected life forms that no

230 human had ever seen. In effect, he brought that world and its climate, ecosystems and biota to the

231 present, to those whose mission was to prepare sensors, probes, and ultimately astronauts to

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232 search for, encounter, and interpret life on unknown worlds elsewhere in the universe—with

233 forms of life no human had ever seen. By illuminating the web of life on Earth in the distant past,

234 he helped open a window to the myriad possibilities of life on other worlds.

235 Influence beyond the Capital

236 As Dale’s career progressed, his influence outside the NMNS grew with it. Dale served

237 as Member-at-Large on the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s Executive Committee 1971–

238 1974, and as Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences from 1978–1981. He

239 was an enthusiastic and interesting speaker, and the number of invited lectures and public talks

240 he presented over the years in Canada and the United States is impressive. In 1984, he became a 241 Canadian citizen (with dual citizenship,Draft as he retained his status in the U.S.). In 1985, Dale was 242 promoted to the highest level available to research scientists in federal government departments

243 and crown corporations in Canada. For better or worse, perhaps Dale’s greatest public exposure

244 occurred when his Dinosauroid appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer. The Dinosauroid

245 was a thought experiment—a hypothetical, humanoid dinosaur that represented Dale’s vision of

246 what would have become of the Stenonychosaurus lineage, had it not gone extinct (Russell and

247 Séguin, 1982). The big-eyed, green-skinned figure is striking and the subject of much discussion,

248 but more on that elsewhere (Naish et al., this volume). Suffice it to say that the Dinosauroid

249 achieved the dialogue that Dale sought to inspire.

250 Dale’s approach in establishing a multidisciplinary palaeontology program in Ottawa had

251 a huge influence on palaeontological developments in Alberta. One of us (PJC) had moved to

252 Alberta in 1976 to take over the position as dinosaur palaeontologist at the Provincial Museum of

253 Alberta (PMA) in Edmonton. Before moving from Montreal, Currie had a meeting with Dale

254 (and C. M. Sternberg) in Ottawa to discuss how a dinosaur research program might develop.

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255 Those ideas took hold and slowly evolved, as the PMA went from a small program with a $4,000

256 annual budget to a successful dinosaur collecting program by 1978, with two curators and six

257 technicians. In the late 1970s, Dale was also the scientific influence behind a bid to have

258 Dinosaur Provincial Park declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There was even talk of

259 trading one of the National Parks in Alberta for the provincially controlled Dinosaur Provincial

260 Park on the Red Deer River. Up to that point, Dinosaur Provincial Park (established in 1955) had

261 been given little attention by the provincial authorities. But this changed drastically in 1978, and

262 the UNESCO submission that was originally to be made by federal government agencies

263 (including the National Museums of Canada where Dale worked, and Parks Canada) was

264 transferred to provincial control. Currie was the palaeontologist now involved, but everyone

265 made sure that Dale was consulted regularlyDraft as the proposal developed. In October, 1979, the

266 package was considered at the meeting in Cairo, Egypt, and Dinosaur Provincial Park became

267 the first palaeontological site on the prestigious UNESCO World Heritage list. There are now

268 more than twenty palaeontological sites on the World Heritage List, including the Burgess

269 Shales, Olduvai Gorge, and Riversleigh. The dedication ceremony followed a year later at

270 Dinosaur Provincial Park, and Dale was amongst the dignitaries recognized on the stage, set up

271 on prairie level overlooking the badlands.

272 The establishment of Dinosaur Provincial Park as a UNESCO World Heritage Site did

273 not bring extra protection, nor significant extra funding to the dinosaur programs of Alberta.

274 However, it was significant in that it made people in the province aware of how important

275 Alberta dinosaurs were considered internationally. Because dinosaur fossils are so common in

276 many parts of the province, Albertans assumed that they must be as common in many other parts

277 of the world. This self-deprecating attitude was challenged by the UNESCO designation, and

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278 suddenly the dozen or so skeletons on display in Calgary, Edmonton, and Dinosaur Provincial

279 Park seemed embarrassingly inadequate, considering hundreds of specimens from the province

280 were on display in major museums around the world. As a direct consequence of the UNESCO

281 designation, Alberta decided to build a major museum for displays about, storage of collections

282 of, and research on dinosaurs from Alberta. The province was in a very solid financial position at

283 that time, and had over $18 billion in what was called the Heritage Trust Fund (Gardner et al.,

284 2015).

285 The idea translated from dream to reality later in 1979, when Dale was visiting the

286 Provincial Museum in Edmonton. Currie was told he had to attend a meeting in Drumheller 287 about the site for the new museum and itsDraft development. He refused on the grounds that Dale was 288 visiting, and he had attended many, many meetings before where nothing happened. An hour

289 later, the Deputy Minister of Alberta Culture appeared unannounced in his office, confronted the

290 two startled scientists, and explained the importance of the meeting. The next day, Currie

291 abandoned Dale to attend the meeting in Drumheller to start planning for what eventually

292 became the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. Although the museum did not open to the

293 public until 1985, the province wanted to announce its construction in 1980, which was the 75th

294 anniversary of Alberta (as well as the Osborn (1905) descriptions of Albertosaurus sarcophagus

295 and Tyrannosaurus rex). The museum was named after Joseph B. Tyrrell, a geologist who found

296 the holotype of Albertosaurus in Drumheller in 1884. Dale had studied that specimen in the

297 Canadian Museum of Nature, and it became a focal specimen in his study of tyrannosaurids of

298 Canada (Russell 1970a). Although Dale was never part of the planning process for the Tyrrell

299 Museum, his interdisciplinary approach influenced the hiring and setup of the scientific staff

300 (which included the existing dinosaur palaeontologist, plus a sedimentologist, another vertebrate

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301 palaeontologist, an invertebrate palaeontologist and a palaeobotanist/palynologist) and the

302 palaeoecological arrangement of the displays. For these same reasons, the Fukui Prefectural

303 Dinosaur Museum in Japan and the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta would request Dale’s advice

304 during their early planning phases.

305 Throughout this period of transition leading up to the construction of the Tyrrell Museum

306 in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Dale continued to work with the field crews in Dinosaur

307 Provincial Park for several weeks every summer. It was an incredible period of productivity and

308 camaraderie that included not just Dale but people like Michael Benton, Peter Dodson, and Jim

309 Farlow. Dale seldom got involved with quarries, but liked to find smaller specimens. In 1981, he 310 reported that he had discovered what lookedDraft like a dinosaur egg, and Currie went out with him 311 the following day to collect it. Although the oval of millimeter-thick material looked like a large

312 egg sectioned by erosion, it turned out to be a cross-section of a pterosaur bone that was

313 described a few years later by Currie and Russell (1982).

314 China-Canada Dinosaur Project

315 Other associations that Dale developed during those years in the Park included several of

316 the Park naturalists. John Acorn eventually worked with Dale on a series of articles and booklets

317 for the general public. Brian Noble worked in the nascent Tyrrell Museum, but eventually struck

318 off to form the Ex Terra Foundation to fund a series of expeditions in Asia and Canada (Grady

319 1993). The concept was to take a multidisciplinary approach of studying dinosaurs and their

320 world to an international level to look at the similarities of Asian and Canadian dinosaurs to learn

321 about their origins, interrelationships, dispersal, ecology, and so on. The first agreements for the

322 Canada-China Dinosaur Project (also known as the China-Canada Dinosaur Project, the CCDP,

323 and the Sino-Canadian Dinosaur Project) were signed within weeks of the public opening of the

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324 Tyrrell Museum in 1985. It was decided that there would be three co-leaders—Dong Zhiming

325 representing the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, Currie

326 representing the Tyrrell Museum, and Dale representing the NMNS. Fieldwork and subsequent

327 research were to be done in China, Alberta, and the Canadian Arctic, and would involve people

328 from all three institutions.

329 The first Sino-Canadian expeditions took Dale/Dong/Currie and associates from both

330 countries to Alberta, the Arctic, and China in 1986. As some of the first western palaeontologists

331 travelling in China in half a century, they attracted a lot of attention in northwestern China

332 (Xinjiang Autonomous Region). The Jurassic of this region was the focus of much of Dale’s 333 attention in China for the following fieldDraft seasons of 1987 to 1990, and research included a paper 334 on one of the biggest sauropods to come out of China (Russell and Zheng 1993). Fieldwork in

335 Alberta that year included five Chinese scientists, students and technicians. Troodontids were

336 considered as the ‘mascots’ of the expeditions because they were found on both continents, had

337 been a prime research interest of Dale’s during his early years in Dinosaur Provincial Park

338 (Russell 1969), had attracted considerable public attention because of Dale’s ‘dinosauroid’

339 (Russell and Seguin 1982), and were nevertheless poorly known anatomically. Ironically, the

340 chief technician from the IVPP (Tang Zhilu) found a beautiful troodontid braincase (Currie and

341 Zhao 1993) in Dinosaur Provincial Park.

342 Dale organized the third leg of CCDP fieldwork for 1986 in the Arctic. With 24 hours of

343 sunlight every day, the days prospecting the Cretaceous deposits of Axel Heiberg and Ellesmere

344 Islands were long and hard. The hope was to find dinosaurs in this area as evidence of animals en

345 route between Alberta and China during the Cretaceous. Although the expedition found a few

346 scraps of bone for the estimated 3,000 man-hours of prospecting, none of it was from dinosaurs.

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347 Dale nevertheless has always had a certain amount of what some people call ‘luck’, and a young

348 Inuit man (Joshua Enookoolook) found dinosaur bones in another part of the Arctic (Bylot

349 Island) when he was working for a geological expedition from Memorial University, headed by

350 Elliot Burden. The bones were placed in Dale’s hands at the Ottawa airport by Burden as he

351 changed flights on his way back from the Arctic, bound for home in Newfoundland. At the time,

352 the Bylot Island hadrosaur phalanx Enookoolook discovered was the most northerly dinosaur

353 specimen known. In 1988, Dale and Clayton Kennedy made an exploratory expedition to see if it

354 was worth taking another CCDP expedition into the Arctic. Dale decided it was, but that did not

355 happen until 1989. 356 One of the largest expeditions ofDraft the CCDP took place in China in 1987, when there were 357 as many as 47 people in the camp in Xinjiang. At the end of the expedition, Dale, Dong, Currie,

358 and others drove more than 6,000 km of unpaved roads across northern China to look for sites

359 that the expedition could work during subsequent years. The stories from that trip could fill a

360 book, and included the first encounters of Dale and Currie with baijiu (pronounced by most

361 Westerners as “By Joe!”) etiquette (Figure 4). The hosts were always very insistent, and Dale

362 would never offend them under any circumstances. So he developed a technique of holding the

363 over-proof liquor in his mouth until nobody was looking, and then would ostensibly wipe his

364 mouth with a washcloth as he dribbled the clear liquid into it. At one banquet, he had to retain

365 the baijiu for too long, and the inner linings of his mouth became so swollen that he was unable

366 to either talk or laugh for several days! It was very odd to not hear his constant good-natured

367 banter, observations, and theorizing!

368 The decision was made after the first camp in Xinjiang to split the expedition into smaller

369 groups, working in multiple areas of China. In 1988, Dale was more interested in the Lower

17 © The Author(s) or their Institution(s) Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences Page 18 of 37

370 Cretaceous beds of the Ordos Basin than the Upper Cretaceous strata at Bayan Mandahu, where

371 Currie was working. Dale was involved in the discovery and collection of a number of

372 Psittacosaurus specimens that were shipped to Ottawa on loan for preparation and study. One of

373 the supposed Psittacosaurus specimens (found in 1988 by Wang Ping) turned out to be the most

374 complete skeleton of a troodontid found to date. Dale was ecstatic and was soon at work

375 describing Sinornithoides youngi, one of the best finds of the CCDP expeditions (Russell and

376 Dong 1993a).

377 The tragic events in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 had a profound effect on the

378 CCDP expeditions. Dong Zhiming had arrived in Canada at the beginning of June, and was 379 working in Alberta with Currie (at DinosaurDraft Provincial Park, Devil’s Coulee, and Grande 380 Prairie). Dale had flown in mid-May to China with others from the CMN and the Tyrrell

381 Museum, and they were in the field in Xinxiang. The temperatures soared, and on May 21st Dale

382 developed a fever, felt cold, and stopped sweating. He was rushed to the closest city of Urumqi,

383 which took some four to five hours, for medical assistance. He spent several days in the city

384 recovering from his bout with sunstroke, then returned to the field where the rest of the crew had

385 continued excavating turtles, dinosaurs, and various other fossils. When the brutal crackdown

386 occurred in Tiananmen Square on June 4th, Dale and the others were oblivious of the details,

387 although they knew flights had been closed down across the country the following day. On June

388 6th, much of the day was spent listening to the bad news from Beijing on the radio. Messengers

389 from the Xinjiang Academy of Science arrived just before supper the following day with news

390 that the Canadians had to fly home, as well as the bad news that Dale’s mother-in-law had passed

391 away. The Canadians packed immediately, said goodbye to their Chinese colleagues, and were

392 driven to Urumqi, arriving at 4 AM. They flew on the 9th to Beijing—where most of the trouble

18 © The Author(s) or their Institution(s) Page 19 of 37 Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences

393 was—to wait for a flight back to Canada. Because most foreigners had already left Beijing and

394 all the flights were full, it was June 12th before they finally returned to Canada.

395 Dong Zhiming did not return to China after the events in Beijing, so the second CCDP

396 expedition to the Arctic went ahead as planned in July, 1989. Pond Inlet on Baffin Island was the

397 jump-off point, and has a spectacular view of Bylot Island across Eclipse Sound. The expedition

398 set up camp on the coast of Bylot a few days later, only a short walk from Dinosaur Valley

399 where Dale had been collecting specimens the previous year. The first day in the field produced

400 some of the best specimens of Late Cretaceous hadrosaurs and hesperornithiform birds from the

401 site. Hundreds of bones and bone fragments were collected in a few days, but it became clear

th 402 that it is a near-shore marine deposit. ByDraft July 14 , the camp had shifted to Ellesmere Island, in 403 an area where there was a historical record of a member of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police

404 patrol who found a string of vertebrae in 1926 in Cretaceous rocks. The CCDP party found

405 several specimens that fit the description in general, but all were plesiosaurs rather than

406 dinosaurs.

407 Following the completion of the CCDP in 1990, Dale became involved with planning for

408 an associated and very successful traveling exhibit, called “The Greatest Show Unearthed”,

409 which showcased some of the remarkable specimens discovered during the five years of

410 fieldwork in China and Canada. He also expanded his involvement in research on dinosaurs of

411 the Hell Creek Formation and northern Africa, isotopes in dinosaur bone, and of course, dinosaur

412 extinction. However, he remained interested in Asian dinosaurs, and in the early 1990s, became

413 fascinated with the Early Cretaceous ecosystems in a series of faulted lake basins in Liaoning,

414 China. The area had long been known for rich, Lagerstätte deposits that produced the Jehol

415 fauna, famous for fossil fish, reptiles including birds and non-avian dinosaurs, invertebrates, and

19 © The Author(s) or their Institution(s) Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences Page 20 of 37

416 plants. The stratigraphic position of the formations in the Jehol Group and their radiometric ages

417 were in question—the basal strata published variously as Upper Jurassic, Upper Jurassic–Lower

418 Cretaceous, or Lower Cretaceous. Dale’s interest was piqued. With Palaeobiology researcher

419 Steve Cumbaa now on staff, a proposal to Chang Mee-Mann at the IVPP was developed and

420 funded as a joint project. A month’s fieldwork followed in late summer 1992 (Figure 5). Samples

421 were collected by Dale from volcanic strata intercalated with lake bed deposits and brought back

422 to the University of Toronto’s Geophysics lab. The samples produced 40Ar-39Ar dates that

423 clarified the Lower Cretaceous (Aptian) stratigraphic position and Early Cretaceous age of the

424 Jehol Group’s basal Yixian Formation and its fauna (Smith et al. 1995). 425 In addition to collecting samplesDraft for dating, the rich vertebrate and invertebrate fossil 426 biota of the lake basins were sampled. Not enough dinosaurs other than psittacosaurs were found

427 to keep Dale’s interest in that aspect of the project, but an isolated humerus of one small

428 sauropod was discovered near Huanghuagou, and a nice theropod trackway and isolated prints

429 were found exposed on the upper slopes of the enormous coal mine near Fuxin. The hot,

430 smoking fissures cracking the surface reminded Dale of his first fieldwork for the NMNS in

431 1965 in the Smoking Hills of Canada’s Northwest Territories, also fuelled by deeply buried,

432 burning coal. At Fuxin, as Dale focused on taking measurements of the theropod tracks, Cumbaa

433 had to warn him to move, as the soles of Dale’s shoes were melting and had started smoking. A

434 couple of days later, another coal mine at Badahao was visited, and samples from a pile of

435 tailings were split and examined. Back in the Jeep Cherokee an hour later, a stoic Dale quietly

436 asked Cumbaa if he had his first aid kit handy, and extended his left hand, fingers clasped tightly

437 around his handkerchief. Dale had put his pointed awl through his left thumb when splitting a

438 sample, and did not want to distress his Chinese hosts by letting them know he had been injured.

20 © The Author(s) or their Institution(s) Page 21 of 37 Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences

439 A surreptitious cleaning, disinfecting, and bandaging took place in the back seat as the vehicle

440 bumped and banged along to the next locality.

441 Into the crepuscular twilight

442 After 30 years in Ottawa, the last few under turbulent senior management conditions,

443 Dale retired from the museum, but not from the profession. He accepted a joint appointment as

444 Visiting Professor in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North

445 Carolina State University (NCSU) and as Curator of Paleontology at the North Carolina Museum

446 of Natural Sciences (NCMNS) in Raleigh. Dale arrived at an auspicious time, and was

447 instrumental in acquiring for the museum the largest (11.5 m long) and most complete skeleton 448 known of the Early Cretaceous theropodDraft Acrocanthosaurus (Currie and Carpenter 2000), as well 449 as the Thescelosaurus “Willo”, known for what was described as the soft tissue preservation of a

450 four-chambered heart by Russell and others (Fisher et al. 2000), although a subsequent study

451 which included Dale among its authors (Rowe et al. 2001) did not support this conclusion.

452 In 1996, Dale returned to Canada for visits to Toronto and Ottawa on a lecture tour for

453 the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in May, and returned to Ottawa in November where he

454 was presented with the Royal Society of Canada’s prestigious Bancroft Award in Geology,

455 which is presented only every second year. The award is given for “publication, instruction, and

456 research in the earth sciences that have conspicuously contributed to public understanding and

457 appreciation of the subject.”

458 Back in North Carolina, Dale was prominent in developing plans for the Nature Research

459 Center at the NCMNS, including the Paleontology Research Lab. As a Visiting Professor at

460 NCSU and cross-appointed to the museum, Dale was able to work much more regularly with

21 © The Author(s) or their Institution(s) Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences Page 22 of 37

461 students than he had been able to do in Ottawa, especially with undergraduate and graduate

462 students (including Terry A. Gates, James Lamb, Sara Rutsky (née Decherd), Holly N.

463 Woodward, and several others). With Reese Barrick at NCSU, he created a successful Bachelors

464 degree program in palaeontology. Dale also found a way to continue working on broader themes

465 with colleagues in other university departments by creating the Center for the Exploration of the

466 Dinosaurian World, and managed some fieldwork in South Dakota and Morocco.

467 In 2009, his last book Islands in the Cosmos: the Evolution of Life on Land was

468 published. In many ways this work pulls together many of the themes Dale pursued over his 45-

469 year career, but it is not for the beginner or the faint of heart. In a review, the book was described 470 as “…an approach to discerning the generalDraft properties of the evolution, particularly 471 macroevolution, of life on Earth”, a much broader context than vertebrate palaeontology (Molnar

472 2010). Studying the evolution of dinosaurs and of the ecosystems of which they were a part was

473 a hallmark of Dale’s work, and his ability to portray those changes through time as if they were

474 unfolding before us in slow motion, particularly in his earlier works, was unsurpassed. Dale’s

475 penchant for metanarrative will not be lost on the reader, no doubt inspired by his devout

476 Catholicism.

477 Dale retired from the NCSU at the end of June, 2003 but continued working half-time

478 with the museum through June, 2010. His interest in Saharan dinosaurs, which had begun in the

479 early ‘90s in Ottawa, flourished with visits to European collections in the late ‘90s and

480 collaborative yearly trips to Morocco related to the National Geographic-sponsored DinoAtlas

481 Project, from 2000–2006. Several publications on Saharan dinosaurs appeared between 1996 and

482 2011. Dale’s last paper (Bell et al., 2015) came full circle, back to the dinosaurs of the Late

483 Cretaceous of western Canada.

484 After retirement, Dale and his wife Janice moved to Elk Grove, CA, near Sacramento.

485 His last institutional affiliation, formalized in 2011, was as Adjunct Professor in the Department

486 of Geology at California State University, Sacramento. Janice passed away near the end of

487 August 2014, and in December of that year, beginning to show signs of Alzheimer’s, Dale

488 moved in with daughter Elizabeth and her family in Rancho Cordova, California. He then moved

489 in with his daughter Maria in Arizona for a year and, as his condition worsened, he moved in

490 June 2018 to a treatment facility near Maria’s home. He passed away on December 21, 2019.

491 Dale and Janice are survived by their three children and 17 grandchildren.

492 Dale Russell will be missed, not just by his closest family and friends, but by all those 493 who were influenced by him and his scientificDraft legacy. Dale was everything a scientist should be: 494 endlessly inquisitive, genuinely collegial and collaborative, and never missing the forest for the

495 trees. These qualities lent Dale an influence in the field of palaeontology that perhaps even he

496 was unaware of. This is evidenced by the growing number of eponymns in his honour (Appendix

497 2). We are grateful to be able to share here some of the stories of the people that knew him best

498 (Supplementary Data 1). Dale once said, “You can’t enjoy science alone; you have to share it”

499 (Friedberg et al., 1989). We are glad that he did.

500

501 Acknowledgments

502 We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the following people for sharing their

503 memories with us in the preparation of the manuscript: son Frank Russell, daughters Elizabeth

504 Horton and Maria Amorose, brother Don Russell, John Acorn, Reese Barrick, Pierre Béland,

505 Gilles Danis, Rick Day, Dick Harington, David Jarzen, Clayton Kennedy, Makoto Manabe,

506 Kieran Shepherd, Darren Tanke, and Holly Woodward. Scott Rufolo and Rick Day helped

507 develop the bibliography. Dale Russell, with input from his brother Don over the years, kept a

508 timeline of significant personal and professional highlights, which Dale’s son Frank updated and

509 made available to us. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticisms of the

510 manuscript, and to Kathlyn Stewart for her editorial efforts.

511

512

513 Literature cited

514 Allain, R. Aquesbi, N., Dejax, J., Meyer, C.A., Monbaron, M., Montenat, C., Rechir, P., Rochdy,

515 M., Russell, D.A., and Taquet, P. 2004. DraftA basal sauropod dinosaur from the Early Jurassic of

516 Morocco. Comptes Rendus Palevol, 3: 199–208.

517 Bell, G. L., Jr. 1997. A phylogenetic revision of North American and Adriatic Mosasauroidea. In

518 Ancient Marine Reptiles. Edited by J.M. Callaway and E.L Nicholls. Academic Press, San

519 Diego, Calif. pp. 293–332.

520 Bell, P.R., Currie, P.J., and Russell, D.A. 2015. Large caenagnathids (Dinosauria,

521 Oviraptorosauria) from the uppermost Cretaceous of western Canada. Cretaceous Research, 52:

522 101–107.

523 Cooper, M.R. 1984. A reassessment of Vulcanodon karibaensis Raath (Dinosauria: Saurischia)

524 and the origin of the Sauropoda. Palaeontologia Africana, 25: 203–231.

525 Currie, P. J., and Carpenter, K. 2000. A new specimen of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis

526 (Theropoda, Dinosauria) from the Lower Cretaceous Antlers Formation (Lower Cretaceous,

527 Aptian) of Oklahoma, USA. Geodiversitas 22: 207–246.

528 Currie, P.J., and Russell, D.A. 1982. A giant pterosaur (Reptilia: Archosauria) from the Judith

529 River (Oldman) Formation of Alberta. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 19: 894–897.

530 Currie, P. J., and D.A. Russell. 2005. The geographic and stratigraphic distribution of articulated

531 and associated dinosaur remains. In Dinosaur Provincial Park, a spectacular ancient ecosystem

532 revealed. Edited by P.J. Currie and E.B. Koppelhus. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind.

533 pp. 537–569.

534 Dollo, L. 1882. Note sur l'ostéologie desDraft Mosasauridae. Bulletin du Musée Royal d'Histoire 535 Naturelle de Belgique, 1: 55–74.

536 Dollo, L. 1884. Le mosasaure. Revue des Questions Scientifiques, XVI: 648–653.

537 Fisher, P.E., Russell, D.A., Stoskopf, M.K., Barrick, R.E., Hammer, M., and Kuzmitz, A.A.

538 2000. Cardiovascular evidence for an intermediate or higher metabolic rate in an ornithischian

539 dinosaur. Science, 288: 503–505.

540 Friedberg, K., Kane, G., and Reavely, L.K. 1989. “The Great Dinosaur Hunt”. The Infinite

541 Voyage (season 2, episode 2). National Academy of Sciences, WQED, Pittsburgh, 4 January,

542 1989.

543 Gardner, J.D., Henderson, D.M., and Therrien, F. 2015. Introduction to the special issue

544 commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, with a

545 summary of the museum’s early history and its research contributions. Canadian Journal of Earth

546 Sciences, 52: v–xxxiii.

547 Gervais, P. 1852. Zoologie et paléontologie françaises (animaux vertébrés) ou nouvelles

548 recherches sur les animaux vivants et fossiles de la France, tome 1. Arthus Bertrand, Paris.

549 Gilmore, C.W. 1912. A new mosasauroid reptile from the Cretaceous of Alabama. Proceedings

550 of the United States National Museum, 41: 479–484.

551 Gilmore, C.W. 1924. On Troodon validus, an orthopodous dinosaur from the Belly River

552 Cretaceous of Alberta, Canada. Department of Geology, University of Alberta Bulletin, 1: 1–43.

553 Grady, W. 1993. The dinosaur project. McFarlane, Ross and Walters, Toronto. Draft 554 Huene, F. v. 1927. Short review of the present knowledge of the Sauropoda. Memoirs of the

555 Queensland Museum, 9: 121–126.

556 Jerison, H.J. 1969. Brain evolution and dinosaur brains. American Naturalist, 103: 575–588.

557 Marsh, O.C. 1872. Note on Rhinosaurus. American Journal of Science, 4: 147.

558 Marsh, O.C. 1878. Principal characters of American Jurassic dinosaurs, part I. American Journal

559 of Science and Arts, 16: 411–416.

560 Marsh, O.C. 1890. Description of new dinosaurian reptiles. American Journal of Science, series

561 3, 39: 81–86.

562 Matthew, W.D., and Brown, B. 1922. The family Deinodontidae, with notice of a new genus

563 from the Cretaceous of Alberta. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 46: 367–

564 385.

565 Mcintosh, J.S., Coombs, W.P., and Russell, D.A. 1992. A new diplodocid sauropod (Dinosauria)

566 from Wyoming, U.S.A. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 12: 158–167.

567 Merriam, J.C. 1894. Über die Pythonomorphen der Kansas. Palaeontographica, 41: 1–39.

568 Molnar, R.E. 2010. A review of Islands in the Cosmos. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30:

569 988–989.

570 Monbaron, M., Russell, D.A., and Taquet, P. 1999. Atlasaurus imelakei n.g., n.sp., a

571 brachiosaurid-like sauropod from the Middle Jurassic of Morocco. Comptes Rendus de

572 l'Académie des Sciences—Series IIA—Earth and Planetary Science, 329: 519–526.

573 Osborn, H.F. 1905. Tyrannosaurus and other Cretaceous carnivorous dinosaurs of the American

574 Museum of Natural History, Bulletin ofDraft the American Museum of Natural History, 21: 259–265.

575 Osborn, H.F. 1906. Tyrannosaurus, Upper Cretaceous carnivorous dinosaur (second

576 communication). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 22: 281–296.

577 Parks, 1926. Struthiomimus brevitertius—A new species of dinosaur from the Edmonton

578 Formation of Alberta. Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, series 3, 20: 65–70.Polcyn,

579 M. J., and Bell, G. L., Jr. 2005. Russellosaurus coheni n. gen., n. sp., a 92 million-year-old

580 mosasaur from Texas (USA), and the definition of the parafamily Russellosaurina. Netherlands

581 Journal of Geosciences, 84: 321–333.

582 Rowe, T., McBride, E.F., Sereno, P.C., Russell, D.A., Fischer, P.E., Barrick, R.E. and Stoskopf,

583 M.K. 2001. Dinosaur with a heart of stone. Science, 291: 783.

584 Roy, J.R. and Russell, D.A. (eds.) 1977. Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions and possible terrestrial

585 and extraterrestrial causes: proceedings of the workshop held in Ottawa, Canada, 16-17

586 November 1976. National Museums of Canada, Ottawa.

587 Russell, D.A. 1967. Systematics and morphology of American mosasaurs (Reptilia, Sauria).

588 Peabody Museum of Natural History Bulletin, 23: 1–240.

589 Russell, D.A. 1969. A new specimen of Stenonychosaurus from the Oldman Formation

590 (Cretaceous) of Alberta. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 6: 595–612.

591 Russell, D.A. 1970a. Tyrannosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of western Canada. National

592 Museums of Canada, Ottawa.

593 Russell, D.A. 1970b. The vertebrate faunaDraft of the Selma Formation of Alabama, part VII: the 594 mosasaurs. Fieldiana (Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago), 3: 1–380.

595 Russell, D.A. 1972. Ostrich dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of western Canada. Canadian

596 Journal of Earth Sciences, 9: 375–402.

597 Russell, D.A. 1975. A new species of Globidens from South Dakota, and a review of the

598 globidentine mosasaurs. Fieldiana Geology (Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago), 33:

599 235–256.

600 Russell, D.A. 1977. A vanished world: the dinosaurs of western Canada. National Museums of

601 Canada, Ottawa.

602 Russell, D.A. 1989. An odyssey in time: the dinosaurs of North America. University of Toronto

603 Press, Toronto.

604 Russell, D.A. 1996. Isolated dinosaur bones from the middle Cretaceous of the Tafilalt,

605 Morocco. Bulletin du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, 4e série, section C, 18: 349–

606 402.

607 Russell, D.A. 1997. Therizinosauria. In Encyclopedia of dinosaurs. Edited by P.J. Currie and K.

608 Padian. Academic Press, San Diego, Calif. pp. 729−730.

609 Russell, D.A. 2009. Islands in the cosmos: the evolution of life on land. Indiana University Press,

610 Bloomington, Ind.

611 Russell, D.A., and Dong, Z.M. 1993a. The affinities of a new theropod from the Alxa Desert,

612 Inner Mongolia, China. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 30: 2107–2127.

613 Russell, D.A., and Dong, Z.M. 1993b. ADraft nearly complete skeleton of a new troodontid dinosaur

614 from the Early Cretaceous of the Ordos Basin, Inner Mongolia, People’s Republic of China.

615 Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 30: 2163–2173.

616 Russell, D.A., and Paesler, M.A. 2003. Environments of mid-Cretaceous Saharan dinosaurs.

617 Cretaceous Research, 24: 569–588.

618 Russell, D.A. and Rice, G. (eds.) 1982. K-TEC II: Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions and possible

619 terrestrial and extraterrestrial causes—proceedings of the workshop held in Ottawa, Canada, 19–

620 20 May 1981. National Museums of Canada, Ottawa.

621 Russell, D.A., and Séguin, R. 1982. Reconstruction of the small Cretaceous theropod

622 Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauroid. Syllogeus (National Museum of

623 Natural Sciences, Ottawa), 37: 1–43.

624 Russell, D.A., and Zheng, Z. 1993. A large mamenchisaurid from the Junggar Basin, Xinjiang,

625 People’s Republic of China. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 30: 2082–2095.

626 Russell, D.A., Rich, F.J. Schneider, V., and Lynch-Stieglitz, J. 2009. A warm thermal enclave in

627 the Late Pleistocene of the South-eastern United States. Biological Reviews, 84: 173–202.

628 Sereno, P.C. 1986. Phylogeny of the bird-hipped dinosaurs (order Ornithischia). National

629 Geographic Research, 2: 234–256.

630 Sereno, P.C., Beck, A.L., Dutheil, D.B., Gado, B., Larsson, H.C.E., Lyon, G.H., Marcot, J.D.,

631 Rauhut, O.W.M., Sadleir, R.W., Sidor, C.A., Varricchio, D.D., Wilson, G.P., and Wilson, J.A.

632 1998. A long-snouted predatory dinosaur from Africa and the evolution of 633 spinosaurids. Science, 282: 1298–1302.Draft

634 Smith, P.E., Evensen, N.M., York, D., Chang, M., Jin, F., Li, J., Cumbaa, S.L., and Russell, D.A.

635 1995. Dates and rates in ancient lakes: 40Ar-39Ar evidence for an early Cretaceous age for the

636 Jehol Group, northeast China. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 32: 1426–1431.

637 Stromer, E. 1915. Ergebnisse der Forschungsreisen Prof. E. Stromers in den Wüsten Ägyptens.

638 II. Wirbeltier-Reste der Baharîje-Stufe (unterstes Cenoman). 3. Das Original des Theropoden

639 Spinosaurus aegyptiacus nov. gen., nov. spec. Abhandlungen der Königlich Bayerischen

640 Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematisch-physikalische Klasse Abhandlung, 28: 1–31.

641 Taquet, P., and Russell, D.A. 1999. A massively-constructed iguanodont from Gadoufaoua,

642 Lower Cretaceous of Niger. Annales de Paléontologie, 85: 85–96.

643 Williston, S.W. 1895. New or little-known extinct vertebrates. Kansas University Quarterly, 6:

644 95–98.

645 Wright, K.R., and Shannon, S.W. 1988. Selmasaurus russelli, a new plioplatecarpine mosasaur

646 (Squamata, Mosasauridae) from Alabama. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 8: 102–107.

647 Young, C.C. 1954. On a new sauropod from Yiping, Szechuan, China. Acta Paleontologica

648 Sinica, 2: 355–369.

649 Yang, Z. J., and Zhao, X. J. 1972. Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis. Institute of Vertebrate

650 Paleontology and Paleoanthropology Monographs, Series A, No. 8. [In Chinese].

651

Draft

652 Figure captions

655

656 Figure 2. The Russell family, summer of 1950. Left to right: Don (brother), Dian (sister), Marion

657 (mother), Clarence (father), and Dale. (Photo provided by Maria Amorose. Used with

658 permission.)

Draft

659

660 Figure 3. A young Dale Russell during one of his field excursions with Arnold Shotwell, 1956.

661 (Photo provided by Maria Amorose. Used with permission.)

662

663 Figure 4. Dale Russell entertains his hosts during the China-Canada Dinosaur Project in

664 Xinjiang, China, 1987. One of many nights of partying and consuming baijiu (willfully or not)

665 that year. (Photo by Cui Guihai, provided by You Hailu. Used with permission.)

Draft

666

667 Figure 5. Dale Russell checking field notes at the Meileyingzi (Nanlu) locality near Lingyuan,

668 Liaoning, China, August 1992. (Photo by SLC.)

669

670 Appendix 1. Taxonomic legacy of Dale Russell.

Family or higher Subfamily Genus Species taxon Mosasauridae Plioplatecarpinae Ectenosaurus Russell E. clidastoides Gervais 1853 Dollo 1884 1967 Merriam 1894 Plioplatecarpus Dollo P. primaevus 1882 Russell 1967 Mosasaurinae Globidens G. dakotaensis Gervais 1853 Gilmore 1912 Russell 1975 Tylosaurinae Tylosaurus T. zangerli Williston 1895 Marsh 1872 Russell 1970b Tyrannosauridae Matthew and Daspletosaurus D. torosus Osborn 1906 Brown 1922 Russell, 1970a Russell, 1970a Ornithomimidae Dromiceiomimus D. brevitertius Marsh 1890 Russell 1972 Parks 1926 Troodontidae Sinornithoides S. youngi Gilmore 1924 DraftRussell and Dong Russell and Dong 1993a 1993a Therizinosauria Alxasaurus A. elesitaiensis Russell Russell 1997 Russell and Dong and Dong 1993b 1993b Spinosauridae Spinosaurinae Sigilmassasaurus S. brevicollis Stromer 1915 Sereno et al. 1998 Russell 1996 Russell 1996 Sauropoda Atlasaurus A. imelakei Monbarron, Marsh 1878 Monbarron, Russell Russell and Taquet 1999 and Taquet 1999 Dicraeosauridae Dyslocosaurus D. polyonychius Huene, 1927 McIntosh, Coombs McIntosh, Coombs and and Russell 1992 Russell 1992 Mamenchisauridae Mamenchisaurus M. sinocanadorum Yang and Zhao 1972 Young 1954 Russell and Zheng 1993 Vulcanodontidae Tazoudasaurus T. naimi Cooper, 1984 Allain et al., 2004 Allain et al., 2004 Styracosterna Lurdusaurus L. arenatus Sereno 1986 Taquet and Russell Taquet and Russell 1999 1999 671

672

673

Draft

674 Appendix 2. Eponymns of Dale Russell.

Family Subfamily Genus Species

Mosasauridae Mosasaurinae Selmasaurus S. russelli Gervais 1853 Gervais 1853 Wright & Shannon, 1988 Wright & Shannon, 1988

Russellosaurinae Russellosaurus R. coheni Bell 1997 Polcyn and Bell 2005 Polcyn and Bell 2005

675

Draft