A couple days back scientists announced the discovery of what could be called a paleontologists (wet) dream. It was the discovery of a dinosaur mummy containing bone, skin tissue and possibly organs and muscles. A find like this is a once in a lifetime for any archaeologist and is something that could turn every fossil collector, natural history museum curator, and manic dinosaur fanatic on their heads. Every dinosaur bone structure you’ve seen at every natural history museum you have been to, is at most 15% real dinosaur bones from the same skeleton. The rest of the bones are not even that, they are castings of other bones collected from other dinosaurs, and in some cases they are bones from completely different dino skeletons. The discovery of the in tact dinosaur mummy will end up, potentially, showing us that we have put many dinosaurs together incorrectly. Their are still some bones that we simply don’t know where or how they attach to the skeleton of many dinosaurs. It may also show us that we have underestimated the actual size of many of these beasts, preliminary CT scans have already shown that we may be placing the vertebrae of many large dinosaurs incorrectly. At most museums these vertebrae are stacked together but the CT scans of this mummy show a 1 centimeter spacing, which may not be a lot on the surface, but could potentially effect the whole animal in an exponential way.
Anyway, dinosaurs are cool…
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/dino_mummy
