Maryańska, Teresa & Halszka Osmólska | Cranial Anatomy of Saurolophus Angustirostris with Comments on the Asian Hadrosauridae (Dinosauria)

  • An uncommon offprint announcing results from the important Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions.

    These expeditions to the Gobi, which were led by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska between 1965 and 1971, resulted in the excavation of thirty-five tons of fossils. They “added greatly to our understanding of the diversity of dinosaurs. The material collected in those few years provided material for major portions of the careers of five or six Polish scientists” and “the scientific descriptions of dinosaurs that soon began to flow from the expeditions were almost exclusively written by Polish women, women who up to then had published on Paleozoic invertebrates” (Dodson, ”Polish Women in the Gobi – In Loving Memory of Halszka Osmólska”, American Paleontologist, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2008). The authors of this piece, Teresa Maryańska (1937-2019) and Halszka Osmólska (1930-2008), were two of these specialists, who worked as a team for many years and became leaders in their field.

    Osmólska has been described as “one of the most productive dinosaur paleontologists of her generation” and “a giant” in the field (Dodson). She graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1955, and spent most of her career at the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she served as director between 1984 and 1989 and also as editor of the Institute’s journal, Acta Palaeontologica. Osmólska “was responsible for the description of 15 genera of dinosaurs. She was solo author of four of these, and first author of two more. The remarkable team of Maryańska and Osmólska was responsible for naming eight genera. She was honored in the names of a basal archosaur, Osmolskina czatkowicensis (Borsuk-Białynicka & Evans, 2003) and two dinosaurs: the oviraptorosaur Citipati osmolskae (Clark et al., 2001), and most recently (June 2008) Velociraptor osmolskae (Godefroit et al., 2008). She was elected to honorary life membership in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2003” (Dodson). Osmólska was also an editor of the The Dinosauria, one of the most important scholarly reference works on dinosaurs, first published in 1990 and “unparalleled for its comprehensiveness at the time” (Borsuk-Białynicka & Jakubowski, “In Memoriam: Teresa Maryańska”, Acta Palaeontologica, volume 64, number 4, 2019).

    Teresa Maryańska was associated with the Museum of the Earth at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, serving as vice-director between 1976 and 2006. “Her research was initially on invertebrate palaeontology. Her thesis concerned the Bryozoa, but she was always interested in vertebrates and looked for an opportunity to study them. Eventually, she was invited to participate in the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions to the Gobi desert, and became an active, highly appreciated participant of all four expeditions” (Borsuk-Białynicka). Maryańska’s first dinosaur research was on the ankylosaurs, and her magnum opus on their anatomy and taxonomy was published in 1977. She then worked on specimens of the pacycephalosaurs, protoceratopsians, and hadrosaurs, and oviraptors. She was also a co-author of several chapters of The Dinosauria.

  • ...Results of the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions–Part IX [offprint from] Palaeontologia Polonica Number 42, pp. 5-24. Warsaw & Kraków: Zakład Paleobiologii, Polska Akademia Nauk, 1981.

    11-page offprint, perfect bound. Original olive wrappers printed in black. 2 plates, illustrations within the text. Some minor creasing at the spine and light rubbing along the edges, small spot to the title page. Very good condition.