The Sentinel-Record (Hot Springs) published the following article about Bobby Watkins, an ASMSA senior named a semi-finalist in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. (Published Nov. 4, 2011)
By JENN BALLARD
Staff Writer, The Sentinel-Record
Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts senior Bobby Watkins said he has always had a love for dinosaurs and after working extensively on a seven-month project, he was rewarded for his hard work on the subject.
The 17-year-old qualified as a semifinalist in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. He is the only student in the state to be selected as a semi-finalist.
“I did a comparative study of Komodo dragons and Allosaurus skull anatomy,” Watkins said Wednesday.
His project, Form Follows Function: A Venomous Explanation for the Exceptional Allosaurus, compares modern Komodo dragons of Indonesia that use venom to hunt with the jurassic Allosaurus, a cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, to determine how the Allosaurus was able to kill its giant prey.
Watkins said he became interested in the project after reading articles about Komodo dragons being proven to be venomous.
“Recently, the Komodo dragon has been discovered to be venomous, which is not yet really common knowledge,” he said. “When I saw that the skull structures were so similar and their ecology is so similar, that’s when I put together that Allosaurus may have been venomous.”
He said multiple studies have taken place across the country on the bone structure similarities, and he was able to study the researchers’ work for his project.
“I read online searches in our library. We’ve got a whole mess of journals in the library,” he said.
Through email, Watkins said he “collaborated with scientists in Australia, England and all around the United States.”
“I actually became pretty good friends with some of the people I talked with,” he said.
In these researchers’ studies, Watkins said the scientists use, “a finite element analysis. I don’t have the equipment, money or know-how of doing one.”
“It basically breaks down a skull into a three-dimensional mesh of lines and applies computer generated stress to it to see how it will react,” he said of this process. “By that, you can tell the amount of bite-force that an organism can put down.
“If the bite-force is weak compared to the size of the prey, the likelihood of killing by bite alone is very small, so that was one of my big pieces of evidence for my theory and had already been done and published.”
Over the summer, Watkins said he traveled to study first-hand with Richard Cifelli, in Norman, Okla., and Rodney Scheetz, in Provo, Utah.
“I actually hit every place at once,” he said. “I mapped out a trail and went. I went to Colorado, then went through New Mexico, then through Utah and came back and took a scenic route and went to Oklahoma.”
Watkins said he received the opportunity to visit Cifelli when he was looking at pictures of the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, where Cifelli is the associate curator of vertebrate paleontology.
“I saw they had fossils there of something that looked like an Allosaurus or something similar to it, so I jumped at that,” he said.
Watkins said while visiting Scheetz at the Brigham Young University Museum, “I was given access to every original Allosaurus specimen that they had with little supervision, which was incredibly unexpected.”
“When I got there, he put me in the bone vault and said, ‘Here is what you’re looking at’ and left,” he said. “I took all the pictures I could get and thanked him generously.”
The project was one of 1,541 projects submitted, and Watkins said he was one of 300 chosen as a semifinalist.
He said each semifinalist received a “gift package but doesn’t get to compete further in the competition, which I was somewhat sad about. They also get $1,000 reward money, a bronze metal, a banner for your school and your name printed in USA Today.”
Watkins said he plans to use his project in other competitions, including the school’s science fair.
He said he doesn’t have any previous experience studying this topic, but has always been an avid fossil collector and plans to study paleontology at University of Alberta in Canada after graduation.