Zilam
03-12-2007, 23:32
http://www.arsgeek.com/?p=3001
Proving once again that there’s a lot more stuff out there that we haven’t found yet, a teenager in North Dakota discovered the remains. Visible are skin textures, possibly some pinstripes and perhaps even some soft tissue.
A PARTIALLY mummified hadrosaur discovered by a teenager in North Dakota may be the most complete dinosaur ever found, with intact skin that shows evidence of stripes and perhaps soft tissue, researchers said today.
Enough of the animal remains to show it ran quickly and was far more muscular than scientists believed such dinosaurs were.
“It’s sort of King Tut meets T Rex,” paleontologist Phil Manning of the University of Manchester in Britain said.
The creature is fossilised, with the skin and bone turned to stone. But unlike most dinosaur fossils, tissues are preserved as well.
This includes large expanses of the animal’s skin, with clear remains of scales.
“This is not a skin impression. This is fossilised skin,” Dr Manning said.
“When you run your hands over this dinosaur’s skin, this is the closest you are going to get to touching a real dinosaur, ever.”
The remains of the hadrosaur, dubbed Dakota, were found in 2000 by Tyler Lyson, then 17, on his uncle’s ranch in North Dakota.
The hadrosaur, a plant-eating dinosaur that walked on two legs, lived 67 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous Period.
Mr Lyson contacted Dr Manning.
Dr Manning had his team remove the monstrous specimen almost intact, with just the tail in a separate block.
It weighed close to 4500kg.
They persuaded Boeing and NASA to use a huge CT scanner usually used to scan space shuttle parts to look at the fossil.
The dense fossil had taken months to scan, Dr Manning said.
“We will know in the next few days if the head is in there,” he said.
The tail piece turned up some surprises. The animal’s back end is 25 per cent larger than previously thought.
Locomotor biologist Bill Sellers of the University of Manchester used a computer program to reconstruct how the hadrosaur would have moved and came up with a picture of an animal that walked not upright, but with its head low to the ground and forearms almost touching.
The strong muscles connecting its upper legs to its tail would have allowed it to run at speeds of up to 45km/h, well ahead of its predator, Tyrannosaurus rex.
Patterns in the scales resemble those associated with skin colour changes in lizards.
This provided the strongest evidence yet that the animal had stripes, Dr Manning said.
The researchers are looking for preserved proteins. They had some results that had been offered to a scientific journal, Dr Manning said.
“It’s contentious. We say we are finding soft tissues where people previously have not looked,” he said.
They also found a second fossil, one that Dr Manning called the “the hand of doom”.
The clawed foot belongs to a species of crocodile that may have been dining on Dakota soon after it died in a riverbed.
“It could have crawled up the back passage of the animal, went to get the guts and ended up stuck,” Dr Manning said.
Oh science, how I love thee. :D
Seriously, this is pretty dang exciting if you ask me.
Proving once again that there’s a lot more stuff out there that we haven’t found yet, a teenager in North Dakota discovered the remains. Visible are skin textures, possibly some pinstripes and perhaps even some soft tissue.
A PARTIALLY mummified hadrosaur discovered by a teenager in North Dakota may be the most complete dinosaur ever found, with intact skin that shows evidence of stripes and perhaps soft tissue, researchers said today.
Enough of the animal remains to show it ran quickly and was far more muscular than scientists believed such dinosaurs were.
“It’s sort of King Tut meets T Rex,” paleontologist Phil Manning of the University of Manchester in Britain said.
The creature is fossilised, with the skin and bone turned to stone. But unlike most dinosaur fossils, tissues are preserved as well.
This includes large expanses of the animal’s skin, with clear remains of scales.
“This is not a skin impression. This is fossilised skin,” Dr Manning said.
“When you run your hands over this dinosaur’s skin, this is the closest you are going to get to touching a real dinosaur, ever.”
The remains of the hadrosaur, dubbed Dakota, were found in 2000 by Tyler Lyson, then 17, on his uncle’s ranch in North Dakota.
The hadrosaur, a plant-eating dinosaur that walked on two legs, lived 67 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous Period.
Mr Lyson contacted Dr Manning.
Dr Manning had his team remove the monstrous specimen almost intact, with just the tail in a separate block.
It weighed close to 4500kg.
They persuaded Boeing and NASA to use a huge CT scanner usually used to scan space shuttle parts to look at the fossil.
The dense fossil had taken months to scan, Dr Manning said.
“We will know in the next few days if the head is in there,” he said.
The tail piece turned up some surprises. The animal’s back end is 25 per cent larger than previously thought.
Locomotor biologist Bill Sellers of the University of Manchester used a computer program to reconstruct how the hadrosaur would have moved and came up with a picture of an animal that walked not upright, but with its head low to the ground and forearms almost touching.
The strong muscles connecting its upper legs to its tail would have allowed it to run at speeds of up to 45km/h, well ahead of its predator, Tyrannosaurus rex.
Patterns in the scales resemble those associated with skin colour changes in lizards.
This provided the strongest evidence yet that the animal had stripes, Dr Manning said.
The researchers are looking for preserved proteins. They had some results that had been offered to a scientific journal, Dr Manning said.
“It’s contentious. We say we are finding soft tissues where people previously have not looked,” he said.
They also found a second fossil, one that Dr Manning called the “the hand of doom”.
The clawed foot belongs to a species of crocodile that may have been dining on Dakota soon after it died in a riverbed.
“It could have crawled up the back passage of the animal, went to get the guts and ended up stuck,” Dr Manning said.
Oh science, how I love thee. :D
Seriously, this is pretty dang exciting if you ask me.