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One of the most complete dinosaur mummies ever found is revealing secrets locked away for millions of years.
The fossilised duckbilled hadrosaur is so well preserved that scientists have been able to calculate its muscle mass and learn that it was more muscular than thought, probably giving it the ability to outrun predators such as a Tyrannosaurus rex.
While they call it a mummy, the dinosaur is not really preserved like King Tut was. The dinosaur body has been fossilised into stone. Unlike the collections of bones found in museums, this hadrosaur came complete with skin, ligaments, tendons and possibly some internal organs, say researchers.
The study is not yet complete, but scientists have concluded that hadrosaurs were bigger - 3.2 metric tonnes and up to 12.2m long - and stronger than had been known, were quick and flexible, and had skin with scales that may have been striped.
"Oh, the skin is wonderful," palaeontologist Phillip Manning of Manchester University in England said.
"It's unbelievable when you look at it for the first time," he said. "There is depth and structure to the skin. The level of detail expressed in the skin is just breathtaking."
The fossil was found in 1999 in the US state of North Dakota and now is nicknamed "Dakota." It is being analysed in the world's largest CT scanner, operated by Boeing. Normally, the machine is used for space shuttle engines and other large objects. Researchers hope the technology will help them learn more about the fossilised insides of the creature.
"It's a definite case of watch this space," Manning said. "We are trying to be very conservative, very careful."
But they have learned enough so far to produce two books and a television programme. The TV special, Dino Autopsy, will air on the National Geographic cable television channel. A children's book, DinoMummy: The Life, Death, and Discovery of Dakota, a Dinosaur From Hell Creek, is on sale and an adult book, Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues and Hard Science, will be available in January.
Soft parts of dead animals normally decompose rapidly after death. Because of chemical conditions where this animal died, fossilisation - replacement of tissues by minerals - took place faster than the decomposition, leaving mineralised portions of the tissue.
That does not mean DNA, the building blocks of life, can be recovered, Manning said. Some has been recovered from frozen mammoths up to 1 million years old, he said. At the age of this dinosaur, 65 million to 67 million years old, "the chance of finding DNA is remote," he said.
The findings from Dakota may cause museums to rethink their dinosaur displays. Most dinosaur skeletons in museums, for example, show the vertebrae right next to one another. The researchers looking at Dakota found a gap of about a centimetre between each one. They estimated the hadrosaur's top speed at about 45km/h, 16km/h faster than the giant T rex is thought to have been able to run.
Dakota was discovered by Tyler Lyson, then a teenager who liked hunting for fossils on his family ranch. Lyson, who is currently working on his doctorate degree in palaeontology at Yale University.
- AP
