Dino Autopsy Update
It's the Holy Grail of paleontology: a 67-million-year-old dinosaur with fossilized skin, tendons and perhaps even muscles and organs. NGC attempts to peer inside this important find.
Dino Autopsy UPDATE , Ancient Map , LIDAR mapping creates snapshots from the past.
Dino Autopsy UPDATE , Secrets of the Flesh , Extremely rare, dinosaur mummy "Dakota" reveals insights into the mysteries of these prehistoric creatures.
Dino Autopsy UPDATE , Update: Dino Autopsy , In the sandy climate of North Dakota, a dinosaur skeleton is discovered in near-mummified condition, scales and all.
Dino Autopsy UPDATE , Inside a Dinosaur , One of the world's largest CT scanners reveals the secrets of a dinosaur skeleton.
Dino Autopsy UPDATE,Computer-generated image of a dead Dakota (dino mummy) on the river bank.
Dino Autopsy UPDATE,Computer-generated image of a T-Rex.
Dino Autopsy UPDATE,A T-Rex bites a hadrosaur from behind in this computer-generated image.
Dino Autopsy UPDATE,The team works to prepare the Hadrosaur block for transportation to the lab.
Dino Autopsy UPDATE,The team at the dig site.
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Dinosaur Mummy Timeline
A dinosaur mummy consists of fossilized soft tissue and is the rarest of finds in paleontology. Even a single dinosaur mummy discovery has the potential to change our understanding of all dinosaurs. Explore some of the significant dinosaur mummy discoveries and find out how they have changed the way we think about dinosaurs.
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Dissecting a Dinosaur Mummy
By William Lee
Peering inside a massive hunk of rock that contains a near-complete dinosaur body requires one of the largest CT Scanners on the planet.
Back in 1999, a high school sophomore named Tyler Lyson spotted three dinosaur vertebrae poking out of the ground on his family’s land in North Dakota. Lyson was no ordinary teenager, but rather a paleontological prodigy who already had 20 dinosaur fossil finds to his credit. But it wasn’t until he returned to excavate the site five years later that he discovered that this one was no ordinary fossil. When he broke off a piece of the surrounding rock, he noticed an unusual pattern, which he initially thought might be a piece of an ancient plant. Instead, when he cleaned the sample back in his lab, he realized that it was an impression of the dinosaur’s scaly skin, shaped as if it was still part of the animal.
“That was really a thrill,” he recalls. “I knew there were other examples of smaller invertebrates being encased and the soft tissue being preserved. I figured that a significant portion of the animal might be out there in the rock.”
Indeed, Lyson had discovered what paleontologists suspect may be a virtually complete specimen of an Edmontosaurus, a three-and-a-half ton, 40-foot-long herbivore that roamed the wetlands that existed 67 million years ago in what is now the dusty, dry North Dakota badlands. Not just the skeleton, but fossilized remains of soft tissue as well, mummified by a mysterious process that scientists are still working to understand. It was an unprecedented find, one that had the potential to rewrite the existing body of knowledge not just about duckbills, but dinosaurs in general.
“Occasionally we’re very lucky and get a partial skeleton and in exceptional circumstances we get a complete skeleton articulated,” explains Phil Manning, head of the paleontology program at the University of Manchester in the UK, who is leading the effort. “That is the absolute ten out of ten for a dinosaur. Dinosaur mummies come in off the scale. These are so rare.”
Dakota, as the duckbill has been named, offers paleontologists a tantalizing chance to examine, for the first time, a near-complete three-dimensional specimen with muscle, skin and other organs intact–the closest we’ll ever come to a living dinosaur, outside of computer-generated ones in the movie Jurassic Park. To unlock Dakota’s secrets, scientists are employing an array of cutting edge technology, ranging from high-resolution three-dimensional laser mapping to recreate the environment in which it lived, to PET scanning of skin samples taken from the mummy in an attempt to identify proteins. They’ve excavated and transported the five-ton hunk of rock that encases the dinosaur mummy and transported it from North Dakota to a Boeing aerospace facility near Los Angeles, where scientists are subjecting it to the biggest and most difficult CT scan ever attempted.
The dinosaur mummy hasn’t been willing to yield its secrets easily. The autopsy has turned out to be an exceedingly difficult project, one in which scientists have had to endure numerous frustrating setbacks and summon every last bit of their ingenuity. While it remains a work in progress, the study of Dakota already has yielded significant new insights about the giant creatures who once ruled the planet. And at last, the team may be on the verge of a breakthrough that could reveal even more.
Next: “Nobody’s ever tried to scan anything this huge.” »
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Dissecting a Dinosaur Mummy
When Dakota wasn’t grazing upon the lush vegetation of its ancient home turf, it may have spent much of its time running away from roaming Tyrannosaurs, who undoubtedly regarded the duckbills as a succulent repast. How precisely Dakota met its demise remains a mystery. But the discovery of a crocodile fossil alongside Dakota provides a clue about what happened after the dinosaur’s death, and how it came to be so well preserved, explains Tyler Lyson, who received a National Science Foundation fellowship and is now working toward his Ph.D. at Yale University.
“I think that Dakota died–who knows what killed it–and was on a sandbar or a river, being scavenged by the crocodile,” says Lyson, who is investigating the process by which dinosaur mummies are formed. “Then you had a rapid flood that buried the two of them together. The waterlogged sediment basically kept a fresh flow of iron coming to the decaying carcass where you had bacteria producing all this carbon dioxide.” The resulting chemical reaction created the iron carbonate tomb that encases the duckbill.
Autopsying an animal that’s been dead for millions of years, not surprisingly, is vastly more complicated than examining a fresh carcass. With the latter, “you can dissect, you can open the body cavity, shove your head in, have a look at the gore,” explains Manning. You can’t do it when it’s been mummified and is made of stone, which ours is. You’re going to need a CT scanner.”
And not just any CT scanner, either. To peer inside something as gigantic and dense as the rock in which Dakota is entombed, paleontologists had to seek help from aerospace giant Boeing’s Santa Susanna Field Laboratory, located 30 miles north of Los Angeles. There, Boeing has built a room-sized CT scanner that it uses to scrutinize Space Shuttle parts for potentially dangerous flaws–and, on occasion, to help paleontologists study dinosaur remains. In the late 1990s, for example, Boeing assisted researchers at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History by scanning the skull of Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex. That imaging revealed, among other things, that the gigantic predator’s brain probably was not much larger than a quart bottle of milk, but that it had an enormous passage for olfactory nerves, suggesting that it had a highly developed sense of smell.
But scanning Dakota has been vastly more difficult, according to Boeing’s Jeff Anders, who is leading the effort. “As far as I know, nobody’s ever tried to scan anything this huge,” he explains. In order to scan Dakota, Boeing workers must first spend a half day dismantling a 14,000-pound wall so that they have room to ease the gigantic stone mass into the room with a forklift. Whenever the body block is moved–for example, when Boeing needs to use the scanner for a spacecraft part–for accuracy’s sake, it has to be set down in almost exactly the same spot as the last time it was scanned, within a margin of error that’s roughly the thickness of a sheet of paper. “It’s quite a major accomplishment just to do that,” he notes. Because Dakota’s stone tomb is six inches bigger than the largest object that the scanner was designed to accommodate, Boeing had to rewrite the instrument’s software to trick it into “putting a square peg into a round hole,” as Anders puts it.
Next: “We’ve already significantly advanced the science…” »
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Dissecting a Dinosaur Mummy
But the iron carbonate sarcophagus encasing Dakota is an even more daunting obstacle than its sheer size, Anders explains. The rock is far denser than anything that the scanner was designed to penetrate. Andres has found himself cranking up the intensity of the scanner’s x-ray bombardment higher and higher. “Essentially, it’s a giant version of the machine you would have in a cancer center–but instead of exposing the patient for a few seconds, we’re running it around the clock for as long as we can. The longest, I think, has been seven days straight.”
Andres has made tooling improvements in the process that he hopes will soon result in a breakthrough on the main part of Dakota’s body. But the scanning already has yielded several terabytes of data for the animal’s tail, which is easier to penetrate. The level of detail–enough to image individual grains of sand and rock inside the mummy–enables researchers to see the subtle textures of Dakota’s skin, almost down to the level of pores.
Based on the dimensions of Dakota’s skin capsule, paleontologists have calculated that the duckbill’s posterior was 25 percent more massive than expected. Manning puts it a bit crudely: “This animal had a big ass.”
That’s a significant detail, because up to this point, paleontologists have been forced to use the size of scars on dinosaur bones to roughly estimate muscle size. Being able to measure Dakota’s skin capsule, in contrast, for the first time gives scientists a much more accurate picture of the creature’s musculature–information that they can use to simulate how it moved.
“Obviously if you have a skinny dinosaur, it’s not going to walk as fast or run as fast as a really musculy dinosaur,” explains Bill Sellers, a University of Manchester locomotion biologist. His computer simulation reveals that Dakota may have been able to reach 25 miles per hour at full tilt. “Not quite as fast as a galloping horse,” Sellers explains. “But it’s really a pretty incredible speed for something as large as our Hadrosaur.” That might significantly alter our understanding of duckbills, transforming them from helpless prey to creatures capable of outrunning a larger predator.
Lyson notes that Dakota includes a much better-preserved hand than the mummified appendage in a German museum that up to this point has been the best specimen. Dakota’s hand confirms that two of a duckbill’s four digits were encased together in skin, with a calloused end. “They probably used that for swimming,” he notes. “In addition to roaming on land, they were partly aquatic, well adapted for eating the vegetation on the bottom.”
“We’ve already significantly advanced the science,” Lyson says. And even more striking revelations are likely to come.
