New Fossils and Hi-Tech Leads to Dinosaur Breakthroughs
Posted on June 23, 2005
Newsweek has a feature on dinosaurs and how recent fossil discoveries and new technologies are uncovering tons of new information about dinosaurs. Recent fossil discoveries include dinosaurs with feathers and intact dinosaurs with fossilized blood, skin and possibly organs. Using powerful computers and improved scanning tools scientists are also able to go back and obtain more information from previously discovered fossils.
Here an excerpt from the discovery of the duck-billed herbivore with skin:
It was on a fossil-hunting trip in the summer of 2000 that Leonardo's fossil was discovered. Murphy returned the following summer to excavate Leonardo, a member of the well-known species Brachylophosaurus -- a Late-Cretaceous duck-billed herbivore that grew as long as 35 feet. As his team worked on a forelimb, a volunteer saw something unusual and called to Murphy. "I took one look and said, 'Oh my God, this is skin'." When he realized he was dealing with more than a skeleton, Murphy had to revise his plan; instead of digging out the bones one by one, he had his team dig around the 23-foot-long specimen, so it could be moved to his research lab in one six-ton chunk.Murphy hopes to transport Leonardo -- still half embedded in sedimentary rock -- to Hill Air Force Base in Utah, which has one of the world's largest CT scanners. There the heart, lung, kidneys and other organs, if they are indeed preserved inside, can be visualized and even modeled in three dimensions.
A CT scan of an entire dinosaur mummy would be an astonishing achievement, writes Adler, but no more so, perhaps, than what Mary H. Schweitzer, a biologist at North Carolina State University, accomplished with a mere fragment of T. rex bone. Schweitzer put the fossil in a weak acid and recovered a flexible substance that resembled collagen, the major organic component of bone, plus traces of red blood cells, which appear to have nuclei, holding out the possibility of recovering genetic material. And when Kent Stevens, a computer scientist at the University of Oregon, modeled on his computer the bones of the large long-necked sauropods of the late Jurassic Period, he discovered their natural position seems to lie almost parallel to the ground, or even below horizontal-an unwelcome revelation to many laymen who usually see them depicted standing foursquare with their heads high above the ground, like fat, short-legged giraffes.