link: http://www.msnbc.com/news/819818.asp
The duckbill fossil, named Leonardo, is laid out for display at the Phillips County Museum in Montana. The numbers are keyed to information about areas of the 23-foot-long fossil. A separate portion of the tail can be seen in the background of the photo.
Dino-mummy shows some skin
Fossilized duckbill dinosaur provides rare clues
about diet and appearance
By Alan Boyle
MSNBC
Oct. 14 A mummified dinosaur from Montana has revealed how the creature looked and how it lived 77 million years ago down to the texture of its skin and the contents of its stomach, scientists say.
NEWS OF THE DISCOVERY wowed scientists last week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologys annual meeting in Norman, Okla., said Nate Murphy, curator of the Phillips County Museum in Malta, Mont. He and two colleagues presented a technical description of the duckbill dinosaur fossil, nicknamed Leonardo, at the gathering.
People were making comments that this was revolutionary, Murphy told MSNBC.com on Monday. One scientist even went so far as to say this is like the Rosetta Stone of paleontology.
The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, helped archaeologists decipher the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Similarly, Leonardo could help paleontologists figure out the anatomy of a long-vanished species, Murphy said.
We have a (fossilized) cadaver or a corpse, and were experiencing CSI, he said, referring to the TV detective drama. Its a real crime investigation.
Only three other mummified dinosaur fossils are known to exist, the researchers said.
Mummified fossils are by no means like the linen-wrapped Egyptian remains from mere thousands of years ago. Rather, the specimens have turned to minerals in such a way that they preserve the look of the skin and internal tissue. In the past, scientists have theorized that mummified dinosaur flesh was dried out before it became a fossil. But Murphy and his fellow researchers believe Leonardo took a different path to posterity.
We think that it was buried in wet river sand around 77 million years ago, and much of the flesh was intact when fossilization started, said Dave Trexler, paleontologist with Timescale Adventures. The pollen from its stomach also shows that the environment was too wet for much desiccation to take place before burial.
This site map of Leonardo at excavation during 2001 shows where erosion removed a section of the tail, the only part missing from the otherwise complete animal.
Volunteer fossil hunter Dan Stephenson spotted the first exposed traces of the two-ton, 23-foot-long (7-meter-long) specimen in a sandstone deposit during an institute expedition in the summer of 2000. He dubbed the fossil Leonardo after observing the name Leonard carved in a sandstone rock, with the date 1916, near the site of the discovery.
Paleontologists say Leonardo was a brachylophosaurus a type of duckbill dinosaur, or hadrosaur. The rock layer where the fossil was found has been dated back 77 million years, to the Late Cretaceous period, Murphy said.
An analysis of the fossilized bone structure led researchers to conclude that Leonardo was a subadult that died when it was about 3 or 4 years old. It still had what we call the cute factor, he said.
In a photo taken from video footage of the excavation, the left forelimb of Leonardo shows the polygonal, scaly appearance of the skin. A pencil is included in the picture for size comparison. The fossil features a three-dimensional rock cast of the right shoulder muscle and throat tissue, along with traces of the skin, toenails, beak and internal organs. The impression reveals that the skin had scales that vary from the size of a BB to the size of a dime, Murphy said with the larger scales covering the forearms as well as the shins.
Those scales served a little bit like armor, he said. The large scales would actually protect the legs better. ... Your lower legs are going to take a beating.
The well-developed muscles of the shoulder and the forearm led Murphy to conclude that duckbills may have used their front legs more than previously thought.
Its a huge muscle thats actually preserved there. If youre mostly bipedal, thats a waste, he said. That led Murphy to speculate that duckbill dinosaurs walked on all fours more than some paleontologists had thought.
Leonardo had a very big, robust neck, Murphy said, with what appears to be a gular pouch a patch of loose skin hanging down from the beak.
Within the fossilized stomach, researchers reportedly could make out shapes from Leonardos last lunch: ferns, conifers and a magnolia-type plant.
Murphy said paleontologists at the Oklahoma meeting were anxious to learn more about Leonardo, and that the specimen would be subjected to far more study including, Murphy hopes, a computerized scan of the fossils internal structures.
Once we get that back, who knows what else well learn about whats inside his chest cavity, he said. Maybe we can settle this whole debate about cold- or warm-blooded.
Other fossils, from Utah and Wyoming, could add even more to our view of a dinosaurs skin and insides.
After the research is done, Murphy said, Im hoping to be able to sit down with Steven Spielberg (director of the dinosaur movie Jurassic Park) and say, Hey, man, you did this right, but we really gotta work on that.