Monday, December 03, 2007

Now, this is downright cool!

A dinosaur that was partly mummified instead of petrified:
Although the first dinosaur mummy was found a century ago, the newly described fossil is striking because it contains soft tissues from the original beast.

The remains of the uncollapsed skin envelope of the tail, arm, and legs of the Hadrosaur were uncovered in a rocky tomb in North Dakota to reveal fossilised skin and tendons that, under the gaze of an advanced scanner, provide a unique and tantalising glimpse of the 3D innards of a dinosaur.

All kinds of interesting things out of this. The changes in how this thing looked sounds like something a Drake character said in Time Safari: that so much of what we 'know' about extinct species is based on guesswork that damn near all of it is subject to change the moment we find something that gives more hard information. For instance, now it's been decided that T-Rex was relatively slow and some argue he was mostly a scavenger; what if it turns out there was something about his structure that allowed him to run faster than we think from looking at the fossils?

Lots of interesting things to come in the future, I have no doubt.

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