New dinosaur mummy found; has intact skin, tissue

[Drewcifer]

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"Dinosaur Mummy" Found; Has Intact Skin, Tissue

John Roach
for National Geographic News
December 3, 2007

Scientists today announced the discovery of an extraordinarily preserved "dinosaur mummy" with much of its tissues and bones still encased in an uncollapsed envelope of skin.

Preliminary studies of the 67-million-year-old hadrosaur, named Dakota, are already altering theories of what the ancient creatures' skin looked like and how quickly they moved, project researchers say.

Further investigations may reveal detailed information about soft tissues, which could help unlock secrets about the evolution of dinosaurs and their descendents, the scientists added.

For now, the team continues to examine the rare specimen, which included preserved tendons and ligaments, and to prepare scientific articles on the find for publication.

"This specimen exceeds the jackpot," said excavation leader Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Britain's University of Manchester and a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee.

Most dinosaurs are known only from their bones, which are seldom found joined together as they would be in real life.

But "we're looking at a three-dimensional skin envelope," Manning said. "In many places it's complete and intact—around the tail, arms, and legs and part of the body."

(The excavation is the subject of Dino Autopsy, a National Geographic Channel special airing December 9 at 9 p.m. ET/10 p.m. PT. The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News and co-owns the National Geographic Channel.)

Find of a Lifetime

The hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, was discovered in 1999 by then-teenage paleontologist Tyler Lyson on his family's North Dakota property.

It was an extremely fortuitous find, because the odds of mummification are slim, researchers noted.

First the dinosaur body had to escape predators, scavengers, and degradation by weather and water. Then a chemical process must have mineralized the tissue before bacteria ate it. And finally, the remains had to survive millions of years undamaged.

"What usually would have been wiped out by the decay process—the mineralization has been so rapid that it is trapped and preserved," Manning said.

"It's such a unique preservational environment here that we'll be able to say, Well, you basically need these conditions to mummify a dinosaur," Lyson, now a graduate student in geology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, told a National Geographic reporter during a field trip to the excavation site.

"I think that's going to be pretty neat."

Big Rear, Fast Runner

Plant-eating hadrosaurs are often called the "cows of the Cretaceous"—the geologic period that spanned 145 million to 65 million years ago—Manning said. They had horny, toothless beaks but hundreds of teeth in their cheeks and a long, stiff tail that was likely used for balance. (Related: "Giant Duck-Billed Dino Unearthed in Utah" [October 3, 2007].)

Preliminary studies are revealing a surprising side to these reptiles, suggesting that Dakota—even though roughly 35 feet (12 meters) long and weighing some 3.5 tons—was no slowpoke.

With the aid of a large-scale CT scanner, the researchers determined how much muscle mass was packed between the bone and skin of Dakota's tail.

This allowed the researchers to infer the muscle mass of the dinosaur's rear end, which they calculated is about 25 percent larger than previously believed. A more muscular rear end means more powerful legs, Manning noted.

He plugged this new measurement into a computer model his team created to figure out how dinosaurs moved.

"Our models confirm this hadrosaur would have had potential to run faster than T. rex," Manning said.

The preliminary calculations suggest Dakota could run 28 miles (45 kilometers) an hour. Tyrannosaurus rex tops out at about 20 miles (32 kilometers) an hour, according to the model. (Related: T. Rex Quicker Than Fastest Humans, Study Says [August 23, 2007])

For Manning, the finding makes perfect sense. Hadrosaurs are believed to have been T. rex prey, so evolution would have favored a faster running speed.

"And that's what our initial findings support," he said.

John Hutchinson studies the movement of living and extinct animals at the University of London's Royal Veterinary College. He said caution is warranted for claims based on computer simulations, which he uses for his own work.

The margin of error for locomotion computer models can be greater than 50 percent, he noted—enough to wipe out the speed difference between a hadrosaur and a T. rex.

"Knowing the leg muscle mass would reduce at least one uncertainty," he commented via email. "That's progress, but there are still huge uncertainties left."

Showing Some Skin

Research into Dakota's fossilized skin is also yielding image-altering clues to how hadrosaurs may have appeared, Manning's team says.

Though the skin has lost its color, much of its texture is still intact, allowing scientists to map it in 3-D to see what Dakota might have looked like.

"There seems to be a variation in scale size that might possibly correlate—as it does in modern reptiles in many cases—with changes in color," Manning said.

"There seems to be striping patternations associated with joint areas on the arm," he added, "and there's interesting information we're looking at in the tail as well."

The 3-D preservation of the skin has also prompted the researchers to search for traces of unfossilized soft tissue in the hopes that it might yield protein.

This April, for example, two teams announced the successful extraction and analysis of collagen, a bone protein, from 68-million-year-old T. rex fossils. Those findings supported the hypothesis that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs.

Manning's team is currently unable to discuss specific findings, which are pending peer review for publication in a scientific journal.

But team member Roy Wogelius, a geochemist at the University of Manchester, said: "We have an array of chemical analysis techniques that we're applying to the organism—and not just to the skin."

Remains to Be Seen

Other experts remain tight-lipped about the potential of Dakota to yield similar information as the T. rex studies.

Mary Schweitzer, a North Carolina State University scientist who worked on one of those projects, declined to comment until formal publication.

And Peggy Ostrom, a zoologist at Michigan State University who also studies ancient proteins for clues to how organisms are related to each other, commented only in general terms.

"It's rare to find an articulated skeleton and even more so to find one with fossilized soft tissue," she wrote in an email.

"If such finds show extraordinary preservation, they tempt us to wonder about the possibility of finding [unfossilized] biomolecules that might be remnants of the ancient organism."

National Geographic News editor Blake de Pastino contributed to this story.

Photo gallery here

[Androsphinx]

Hugely cool.

[K. A. Pital]

[cretinist]this is the ultimate proof dinosaur lived with men! soft tissue, could not have been preserved for so long, just as blood!

Remember, only if you believe in...[/cretinist]
...Cthulhu, will you be eaten first.

On a serious note, jolly good news for paleontology.

[Academia Nut]

This new data could also be interesting for how we view all the dinosaurs of that time and place. If hadrosaurs were a prey species of Tyrannosaurs (didn't they find a healed over rex tooth mark on a hadrosaur spine once?) then this new revelation of their speed may mark a new way of looking at Tyrannosaur hunting methods. And with Tyrannosaurs as keystone predators, this would change the way we look at all their prey species.

Very cool.

[wolveraptor]

I hate these articles. Every time I see the title, I think, "OMFG!! Jurassic Park!" Then those bastards have to ruin my dream with stuff like this:

Then a chemical process must have mineralized the tissue...

Still a cool find, though. It'd be awesome-er still if they found a carnivore whose skin showed evidence of feathers. I like the way that would look.

[Academia Nut]

Feathers seem to be mostly on the smaller dinosaurs, which makes sense as they would have more need for some form of insulation whereas the bigger ones have their surface-to-volume ration working for them to retain heat. They've already found skin imprints of the big carnivores like T. rex and the verdict is that they don't have feathers.

[wolveraptor]

Feathers seem to be mostly on the smaller dinosaurs, which makes sense as they would have more need for some form of insulation whereas the bigger ones have their surface-to-volume ration working for them to retain heat. They've already found skin imprints of the big carnivores like T. rex and the verdict is that they don't have feathers.

I should've been more clear - I was referring to smaller dromaeosaurids.

[Academia Nut]

I'm pretty sure they've found evidence of feathers on Velociraptor and Deinonychus, and there are some artists renditions floating around in places. They look kind of like really fucking scary turkeys.

[DPDarkPrimus]

I'm pretty sure they've found evidence of feathers on Velociraptor and Deinonychus, and there are some artists renditions floating around in places. They look kind of like really fucking scary turkeys.

I like the artist interpretations where the babies hatch with down on them, bu the adults don't have any feathers to speak of.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I am not going to lie, I had a nerd-gasm when I saw this. It's all I really can say.

[Superman]

I am not going to lie, I had a nerd-gasm when I saw this. It's all I really can say.

Aren't there laws against that or something?

[weemadando]

I am not going to lie, I had a nerd-gasm when I saw this. It's all I really can say.

Aren't there laws against that or something?

Not where I live. I had a similar experience on reading this.

But then again, I also worked in a Paleontology dept at a museum for a while.

[Anguirus]

Feathers seem to be mostly on the smaller dinosaurs, which makes sense as they would have more need for some form of insulation whereas the bigger ones have their surface-to-volume ration working for them to retain heat. They've already found skin imprints of the big carnivores like T. rex and the verdict is that they don't have feathers.

I should've been more clear - I was referring to smaller dromaeosaurids.

Velociraptor was feathered.

http://www.physorg.com/news109516799.html

[Anguirus]

Ghetto Edit: Oh yeah, this is CRAZY AWESOME news!

[Drewcifer]

Given the large and muscular tail, I wonder if it was used a fifth limb, similar to modern kangaroos.

Another fascinating point is the variation of scale size, possibly indicating a striped camouflage pattern.

Nerd-gasm indeed!

[Elfdart]

The tails of duckbills had all those bony rods, so it was fixed in a rigid position. It couldn't move the tail side-to-side or up-and-down enough to be used as a weapon or kickstand. The tail was almost purely to balance the front end of the animal. That's why they could walk on all fours with such relatively puny front limbs.

This appears to be Anatotitan or Edmontosaurus.

[Ritterin Sophia]

This appears to be Anatotitan or Edmontosaurus.

Wouldn't that make it a juvenile at only 32 ft rather than the typical 40 ft and 42 ft (respectively)?

[Kanastrous]

You know how tracking mutations in mitochondrial DNA can fix relative distances-in-time between organisms?

A) Can that technique be applied to placing the hadrosaur in time relative to modern organisms?

B) Is there reason to hope that mitochondrial DNA sufficient to serve the process, might be recovered from the hadrosaur remains?

[Elfdart]

This appears to be Anatotitan or Edmontosaurus.

Wouldn't that make it a juvenile at only 32 ft rather than the typical 40 ft and 42 ft (respectively)?

Or the difference between a large male and a female. Bull bison weight over 2000# while cows weigh a little over half that much.

[Darth Raptor]

I'm pretty sure they've found evidence of feathers on Velociraptor and Deinonychus, and there are some artists renditions floating around in places. They look kind of like really fucking scary turkeys.

They've found copious amounts of evidence for feathered dromaeosaurs. Mostly in China and Mongolia, and mostly with smaller species, but that may have more to do with the location than the animals themselves. Feathers, especially fine down, do not preserve well. The conditions have to be just right.

Depending on who you talk to, the Dromaeosauridae is actually a family of flightless, avian birds. More birdlike still than Archaeopteryx. Modern reconstructions even have the big species like Utahraptor decked out in plumage, complete with pinion feathers on the wings and tail.

[Kuja]

FUCKING. COOL.

[Shogoki]

First thing that came to my mind:

The Evil Dead: Prehistoric Dead

Seriously, we need a Zombie/Mummy dinosaur B movie ASAP.

[Darth Yoshi]

That's awesome. I am rather surprised at how wide the tail is, but I suppose it would need to be to serve as a proper counterbalance.