Montana State University student publishes paper on new tyrannosaur species found in Montana

Elías Warshaw uses a jackhammer to remove overburden at the Daspletosaurus wilsoni quarry.
Photo courtesy Dickinson Museum Center

BOZEMAN – Millions of years before Tyrannosaurus rex roamed western North America, generations of its multi-great-great-grandparents likely dwelt and evolved in what was then a much warmer, balmy environment, according to a recent scientific paper by a Montana State University student.

Elias Warshaw, a senior studying paleontology in MSU’s Department of Earth Sciences in the College of Letters and Science, is the lead author of an article published in the journal PeerJ that analyzes a fossil discovered in Montana's Valley County in 2017 and suggests it is a missing link in T. rex’s evolutionary chain.

Warshaw was part of the team that unearthed the Daspletosaurus wilsoni fossil — named after former MSU student Jack Wilson who discovered it — from beneath 25 feet of rock in the badlands north of Fort Peck Reservoir. Warshaw joined the dig as a sophomore in 2021 and started writing the paper even before the entire specimen was out of the ground.

He and co-author Denver Fowler, an MSU alumnus and curator of the Badlands Dinosaur Museum in Dickinson, North Dakota, compared the fossil nicknamed Sisyphus to two other Daspletosaurus species – one about a million years older and the other about a million years younger. Though all are members of the tyrannosaurid family that includes T. rex, the three species were found in geologic strata deposited at different times. Warshaw said this indicates that they represent consecutive rungs on an evolutionary ladder connecting one ancestor species to its descendant, rather than separate lineages originating from common ancestors but evolving into individual species that co-exist in the same time period, like humans, apes and other primates.

“It’s the best explanation of the data we have available, but we never really know anything for sure because the sample size in dinosaur science is so small,” Warshaw said. “It’s something that will require more work going forward.”

Sisyphus was an adult tyrannosaur, measuring about 30 feet long at the time of its death approximately 76.5 million years ago. The fossil has eye sockets and skull properties similar to T. rex, which lived 10 million years later. And like the older specimen, Daspletosaurus torosus, Sisyphus has a prominent set of horns around its eyes.

The PeerJ paper states that characteristics of the three specimens lend credence to the theory that several species of Daspletosaurus evolved along a single lineage from which T. rex descended.

Warshaw said publishing a scientific paper as an undergraduate “is a dream come true.” He has written another that is in review and is working on two more.

A native of New York, Warshaw came to MSU as a freshman in January 2020 to continue his lifelong study of dinosaurs. He learned about MSU because he was a fan of renowned paleontologist Jack Horner, the longtime curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies who retired in 2016.

Fowler, who earned his doctorate in paleontology from MSU in 2016, said four to five MSU paleontology students usually participate in the Dickinson museum’s field work each summer, as Warshaw did in 2021.
“On the walk out to the site every day, Elias was talking a lot about different aspects of tyrannosaurid evolution and anatomy. He had obviously done lots of reading and explored this on his own time,” Fowler said. Realizing that Warshaw was an excellent candidate for a graduate program in paleontology, to which admission highly competitive, “I thought, ‘He needs a specimen,’ and asked, ‘Do you want to describe it?’ I was confident he would be able to do so, and he was up for that.”

Fowler explained that Warshaw’s base knowledge of paleontology was quite extensive and his thinking advanced. He lauded Warshaw’s willingness to think in different, even unpopular, directions and consider multiple hypotheses about the tyrannosaur family tree.

Warshaw exhibited his scientific steadfastness when he and Fowler attended the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting in Toronto in November 2022, shortly before their paper was published.
“He hadn’t presented at a professional meeting before, but he knew the details better than I did,” Fowler said. “He was handling himself well with all the tyrannosaur experts.”

Fowler says he routinely reaches out to students in MSU’s paleontology program, which he speaks highly of. He said the program offers classes that typically aren’t available to undergraduate students elsewhere, including one in comparative anatomy that heightens understanding of the fossil record; it serves and nurtures both students who wish to pursue research and those who don’t; and it is affiliated with the Museum of the Rockies, which Fowler describes as “an enormous resource for anybody interested in fossils.”

“I got this job (at Badlands) because of my experience at the Museum of the Rockies,” Fowler added.
Paleontologist David Varricchio, MSU professor of earth sciences, said the university attracts many exceptional paleontology students from across the country and outside the U.S. He counts Warshaw among them.

“Elias is one of those very bright and motivated students,” said Varricchio, who advised Warshaw on an independent study of tyrannosaurs that required mastery of advanced analytical techniques.

Of the paper, Varricchio said it reflects the growing refinement of knowledge about dinosaurs in specific layers of the rock record and is also notable because of its author.

“Seeing a manuscript through to publication is a lot of work – anytime an undergraduate does that, it’s quite impressive,” he said.

Though Warshaw has been enrolled at MSU for only three years, he has taken a heavy course load, putting him on track to graduate as soon as he finishes his summer field course, which is the senior capstone for paleontology students. He said MSU gave him the flexibility each semester to proceed at his own pace while still leaving him time to pursue opportunities like the Badlands Dinosaur Museum’s field work.

He plans to continue to study paleontology with the goal of becoming a researcher who works with fossils so that he can look for answers to “endless questions, most of which we will never know the answers to,” he said. “That’s part of the fun.”