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Dinosaur Mummy Found
sckienle writes "Although the dig was a year ago, MSNBC has an article about a very rare dinosaur find. It starts off with "A mummified dinosaur, unwrapped from the rocks of 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." Unfortunately, the details are mostly missing in the article. This isn't the first mummified dinosaur found but it is the first in a long time."
So much for all those who were postulating about dinosaurs in Day-Glo colors... /Nanoox.
The cool thing is, if the stomach contents are intact enough, we may have access to some plant-life that was not previously available. This appears to be a duckbilled dinosaur, so it's likely a herbivore. Too bad, if it were a big-bad t-rex we may have gotten a 2-for-1 with anything else inside its stomach, depending on the state of digestion at death.
Personally, I'd be quite interested in the breathing and circulatory apparati of dinosaurs. Getting blood and oxygen around the systems of these big guys may have required organs a little different than current-day creatures (I don't think there are any reptiles this large alive to-date). Perhaps they're able to breathe through their skin, although I believe that is generally characteristic of amphibians and not reptiles.
Hmmm... tastes like million-year-old chicken - phorm