A dinosaur skeleton at Dinosaur Provincial Park was always the point of interest of tourists. The most interesting fact about the skeleton was, it had no head for almost a century. Paleontologists from the University of Alberta have successfully installed the head in the headless skeleton by matching a Corythosaurus skull.
EurekAlert has reported that the skull has been kept at the university's Paleontology Museum since 1920 when it was discovered by George Sternberg. The Corythosaurus skeleton first caught the attention of tourists in the 1990s at Dinosaur Provincial Park. In 2010, technician of the Royal Tyrrell Museum Darren Tanke first noticed from the newspaper clippings from the 1920s that the skeleton could be related from the skull that Stenberg has caught.
Graduate student of the University of Alberta, Katherine Bramble who was also part of the study, said in a statement,“In the early days of dinosaur hunting and exploration, explorers only took impressive and exciting specimens for their collections, such as skulls, tail spines, and claws. Now, it's common for paleontologists to come across specimens in the field without their skulls”. She also explained that they have used anatomical measurements of the skull and the skeleton to construct a statistical analytic.
Paleontologists declared in the official web page of University of Alberta that they were able to successfully reconnect the skull in 2012 and now the specimen is placed in the University museum. Bramble also added that dinosaurs skeletons that remained under the ground for years, got scattered due to natural erosion. This fact has become more common that while one institution is digging one part of the skeleton then another institution has got another part of the same specimen.
However, paleontologists are developing plenty of processes to match body parts of the fossils and skeletons. In this case, the team has used anatomical measurement, but there are, but there are many other ways of matching, such as conducting a chemical analysis of the rock in which the specimens are found.
