The Vyatka Paleontological Museum

Quite unexpectedly, the city of Kirov turned out to have an excellent paleontological museum that had already been operating for a second year, organized around finds from the Kotelnich locality. Between 1933 and the 1990s, complete skeletons and remains of about 20 fossil amphibian and reptile species new to science were found here. Their names play on the toponyms of the places where they were found and first described—Kotelnich, Vyatka (Vyatka being the old name of the city of Kirov and still the name of the river on which it stands), as well as the names of researchers. The finds have parallels with certain South African paleontological localities because of the similar way the animals entered the “stone chronicle”: in the Permian, on the site of the present bed of the Vyatka River between the town of Kotelnich and the settlement of Vishkil (where the Kotelnich excavation locality is situated), there was a swamp into which animals wandered and found their death. As a result, they fossilized not lying on their sides but standing, which facilitates the work of paleontologists and makes the fossils more informative. The local finds include: Among labyrinthodonts: among batrachomorphs, fragments of the skull of a possibly neotenic amphibian, Dvinosaurus primus; among anthracosaurs, only three finds of fragments of chroniosaur scutes (Chroniosaurus levis). Among parareptiles: several nycteroleterids (genus Nicteroleter; for some reason the representative bears the name Emeroleter levis), skink-like insectivorous creatures; more than a dozen complete skeletons of pareiasaurs (“cheeked lizards”), which were given the name Deltavjatia vjatkensis because of the characteristic delta-shaped skull. Among anomodonts: representatives of dicynodonts (herbivores with corresponding adaptations—a horny beak and powerful grinding jaws—assigned to the new genus Australobarbarus, meaning “stranger, alien from the south”), and Suminia (after which the museum’s website is named: the first tree-climbing reptiles and consumers of silica-rich horsetails, as indicated by wear traces on their teeth; they received the name Suminia getmanovi in honor of the head of the excavations, D. L. Sumin, and the discoverer, S. N. Getmanov of the “Stone Flower” cooperative). Among gorgonopsians: in contrast to the large representative Inostrancevia alexandri (a skull model of which is displayed for comparison and is indeed impressive), the small (up to 70 cm) Viatkogorgon ivakhnenkoi, described by Academician L. P. Tatarinov and named in honor of Doctor of Biological Sciences M. F. Ivakhnenko, was discovered together with the skeleton of a large Suminia, which it probably hunted and with which it became trapped in the mire, preserving the skeletons of predator and prey in the smallest details. Among therocephalians: the scylacosaur Viatkosuchus sumini (“Vyatka crocodile”) and the smaller scaloposaur Karenites ornamentatus; Proburnetia vjatkensis, an animal described from a skull impression bearing horns and projections of unknown purpose; and also other representatives of these groups, whose names likewise play on the toponyms Vyatka and Kotelnich—scaloposaurs Scalopodontes kotelnichi, Perplexisaurus foveatus, Scalopodon tenuisfrons, and Chlynovia serridentatus, as well as the scylacosaur Kotelcephalon viatkensis. For a long time these finds were displayed in Kotelnich, and recently, thanks to the availability of funds, premises, and enthusiasts, they were moved to the VPM. Returning to the subject of the museum, one cannot but be pleased by the combination of two conditions: interesting local material and excellent presentation. The museum has only two halls: the “Permian Period Park” (mainly with local finds, but also with models of estemmenosuchids, Inostrancevia, and other creatures of the time) and the general hall (with models and charts on animal evolution from the first invertebrates to the first lobe-finned fishes). Particularly impressive in the general hall were: a life-size model of a tyrannosaur head, next to it a 1:1 cast of its brain and a hind-foot track; a Tarbosaurus skeleton; and improvised “excavations”—a model of a one-and-a-half-meter dinosaur fossil sprinkled with sand, available for excavation with the brush lying nearby (I got stuck there for about ten minutes). In general, the exhibition is very informative and visual, and everything is still in excellent condition. What pleased me most, however, was that the information obtained while viewing the exhibition was understandable and, in many respects, familiar, and could easily be “sorted into drawers” (like, oh, that is the tooth whorl from the lower jaw of a fossil shark). I even managed to find an actual mistake on one of the stands (not merely a typo, though those occurred in places too—where without them), concerning the origin of birds from dinosaurs; a post about it is awaiting moderation on the museum website’s guestbook. The website, by the way, is also very good and informative: it contains photographs of the exhibition, excavations, the process of preparing exhibition halls, much fuller descriptions of the finds than those presented above, and news. All in all, the museum in Tyoply Stan may perhaps impress me even more when I get there, but for now I am impressed by how close such a paleontological nugget can turn out to be. Well done, people of Vyatka. It is a pity that Kharkiv has nothing like this and cannot have it.