May 21, 2016

By Sarah Kaplan

An artist's rendering of Judith, the new horned dinosaur Spiclypeus shipporum. Her diseased left front leg is held close to the body because it can’t bear the animal’s weight. (Mike Skrepnick)

Bill Shipp isn't a dinosaur doctor. He's not even a paleontologist. But when he looked at the skeleton of the creature he discovered on his Montana ranch 10 years ago, an ancient horned dinosaur he called Judith, it was obvious she had been through a lot.

One of her front leg bones showed signs of advanced arthritis that would have made walking almost unbearable. A horn-sized hole in her skull looked like it was drilled by a member of her own species during an attack. And the remains were covered in the marks of huge, sharp teeth — likely left by the predator that brought about her untimely end.

And, 76 million years after she was killed, it looks like Judith is having the last word: This week, she goes on display at the Canadian Museum of Nature, the first representative of a newly named species.

"She's taking her place in the body of scientific knowledge that's out there," Shipp said. "And she's contributing to that knowledge."

A study of Judith's remains, reported Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, revealed that she represents a previously unknown relative of the triceratops. When she was alive, she was likely a sight to behold: Weighing in somewhere between a rhinoceros and an elephant, her massive beaked nose could pick apart vegetation with scalpel-like precision, while her sideways-pointing brow horns would have warned other creatures not to come too close. A massive, spiked frill around the back of her neck would put the most sartorial Elizabethan courtiers to shame.

Judith's research team, led by Canadian Museum of Nature paleontologist Jordan Mallon, christened her species Spiclypeus shipporum (pronounced "spi-CLIP-ee-us ship-POR-um"); the genus name, which means "spiked shield," references Judith's tremendous neck frill, while "shipporum" honors her discoverer.

Judith's species was just one of several horned dinosaurs alive at the time, and she would have distinguished prospective mates — and potential enemies — by the very particular orientation of the horns and spikes on their massive frills.

"It was a very diverse ecosystem at the time, so we have all these questions about how did they live together and avoid competing and who was eating what," Mallon said. "Judith fits into that bigger picture ... and helps us understand it."

When the snows melted, the streams that ran down from the Rockies' icy peaks would have surged over the banks, flooding Judith's habitat first with water, then with a thick layer of sediment. These deposits kept ancient skeletons perfectly preserved — like a layer of geological packing peanuts — through millennia of global change.

Shipp was aware of this when he and his wife bought a ranch in northern Montana about a decade ago, and after a 45-year career in nuclear physics — the tail end of it as head of the nuclear facility at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls — he had a scientist's unquenchable curiosity, not to mention a general distaste for simply sitting still. Thinking that fossil hunting might be a fun activity for a weekend afternoon, he recruited a local amateur paleontologist to show him how it was done.

Just a couple of hours into his first afternoon of searching, Shipp spotted a strange, long, white object just barely buried in a hillside.

It was a leg bone. A massive one.

"People ask me all the time, 'How did you find it?' " Shipp said. "And I always say 'I accidentally found it on purpose.' I was actually looking for it with no expectations of finding anything. But there it was."

Some six years later, Shipp and his team were able to piece the excavated remains together into an impressive and fantastic looking creature. Shipp called her Judith, for the Judith River rock formation where the fossil was uncovered. (Though he and the paleontologists who examined the fossil refer to it as "her," it's not clear yet what Judith's sex was — generally speaking, scientists have a hard time determining dinosaur sex.)

But Shipp still didn't know exactly what kind of creature Judith was. Meanwhile, word was traveling in the paleontology community that a hobbyist in Montana had made an astonishing find.

"I'd kind of heard of it through the grapevine and seen pictures of it," said Mallon, a horned dinosaur specialist. "There was some consensus that it was a new kind of horned dinosaur, but no one had been able to get a good look at it."

About a year ago, Shipp was visiting Ottawa for a physics conference (he is, as he likes to say, only "semi-retired") and decided to stop by the museum to visit its horned dinosaur collection, which is considered among the best in the world. A receptionist called Mallon and asked him if he wanted to talk with the visitor. Before he knew it, Mallon had agreed to help investigate the specimen, and Shipp had promised to donate Judith to the museum for display.

Teaming up with four other paleontologists who were already working on the project, Mallon helped identify Judith's species and figure out how she fit into the hierarchy of dinosaurs at the time.

"As it emerged she was a new genus and a new species, that was a very exciting thing for me," Shipp said. "You get to do that once in a lifetime, if you're really lucky. I mean, really, really lucky."

But analysis of Judith's battered remains added a sour note to the excitement of discovery. When radiologists looked at her disfigured left humerus, which bore a big, bony mass near the shoulder joint, they determined that her arthritis would have rendered the limb basically unusable. A huge hole near her elbow shows where the bone opened up to drain infection out.

"It probably caused a lot of pain for Judith," Mallon said. "You can just see her, hobbling along on three legs like a tripod."

Judith probably would have been abandoned by her herd, he added, because she was unable to keep up with them. And though he can only speculate about the source of the huge hole in her bone frill, the fact that it's the exact size of a Spiclypeus horn could indicate that she was attacked by one of her own.

"It may have weakened her, but it didn't kill her," Shipp said. "She was tough, no doubt about that."

Shipp still strolls his Montana property from time to time, searching for tell-tale signs that something exciting might be hiding in the dirt. He invites his paleontologist friends, including Mallon, to come out and join him. So far they haven't found anything more than pieces and parts — a few teeth, fragments of bone. And Shipp acknowledges it would be "beyond a reasonable expectation" to think he'd ever make another discovery like Judith.

"You can only cover a small part of [the land] and it's steep and difficult ... but that doesn't mean we don't look," he said. "One day we may get lucky again."

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