Dinosaur `Mummy’ Found

THE amazing discovery of one of the finest and rarest dinosaur specimens ever unearthed – a partially intact dino mummy found in the Hell Creek Formation Badlands of North Dakota was made by 16- year-old fossil hunter Tyler Lyson on his uncle’s farm.

The story of the find, the excavation of the mummy and its painstaking analysis by a team of international scientists is told in a new book from National Geographic, Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues and Hard Science, by internationally renowned British paleontologist Phillip Manning. This story examines a 65-million- year case so cold it’s the hottest development in modern dinosaur hunting.

The fossilized remains, discovered in 1999, included not just bones, but fossilized soft tissues like skin, tendons and ligaments. Most importantly, it was the first-ever find of a dinosaur where the skin `envelope’ had not collapsed onto the skeleton. This has allowed scientists to calculate muscle volume and mass for the first time.

The Hadrosaur’s backside is some 25 percent bigger than originally thought, enabling it to reach speeds of 28 mph – 10 mph faster than T. rex.

In this book Manning tells how he and Lyson – now a geology and geophysics graduate student at Yale University – and a multidisciplinary team of scientists embarked on an extraordinary project to excavate, preserve and analyze the ancient, enormous creature they have dubbed Dakota, using hard-won experience and cutting-edge technology to peer millions of years into prehistory. The result is an accurate and revealing portrait of a single dinosaur and the Late Cretaceous world in which it lived.

“The fossilised bones of the hadrosaur that Tyler discovered would allow the resurrection of many grave secrets locked in stone for more than 65 million years. The presence of rare soft-tissue structures would ensure that this fossil would become a member of a prehistoric elite – dinosaur mummies. Such remarkable fossils enable immense advances in our understanding of long-vanished lives and forgotten worlds,” writes Manning in his prologue.

Similar discoveries have added to our knowledge and understanding of these remarkable fossils, but none so much as Dakota, whose secrets are being explored by Manning’s international team of scientists who work with everything from tweezers, plaster and burlap to protein analysis, electron microscopes and the world’s largest CT scanner, originally built to examine NASA spacecraft

Among the exciting discoveries are a fleshy pad on Dakota’s palm, hooves on its feet made of keratin, and well-preserved skin scales that vary in size and shape across the body, tail, arms and legs of the dinosaur.

More details on the discovery of Dakota and dinosaurs in general can be found at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/dinosaurs.

(c) 2007 Sunday Mail; Kuala Lumpur. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.