Dinosaur Fossil Found With Preserved Soft Tissue

damn_registrars writes "A fossilized hadrosaur has been uncovered in South Dakota that has preserved soft tissue. This is described as a "mummified" dinosaur, and allows for a look at the skin and musculature of some parts of this animal. The find was reported by a 24 year old Yale graduate student of paleontology."

Comments

Question

[Major Blud]

According to the FTA, the find was originally located in 1999, and partially excavated in 2004 with a full investigation commencing in 2006. Having never studied archeology or paleontology, is it common for sites like this to be passed by even though there is something located there?

Re:Question

[Cedric Tsui]

According to an archeology professor of mine at Queen's University, this is very common. Excavation is a slow process, and one which is dependent on the weather. Furthermore, it is a funding intensive project.

You find a site, then you apply for funding. When you get your funding, you start the dig. Generally you only get the summer as rain, snow or ice can damage artifact and generally make digging harder. At the end of the digging season, you place some sort of modern marker at the edges and bottom of the trench (my professor used soda cans) and fill them in until the next time you can come back.

If your site proves to be interesting, you can get the funding renewed for another summer, and as a rule of thumb they give you funding every 2 years. This allows the funding to be spread out over a wider range of projects, and ensures the scientists have the time to publish what they found during the excavation.

Dino DNA

[Raul654]

This isn't the first time they've gotten soft tissue from a dinosaur. A few years ago, they were trying to haul some dinosaur bones from a dig site by helocopter, but the bones wouldn't fit. After trying to solve the problem several ways, they made the agonized decision to break some of the largest bones. When they broke them open, they found soft tissue in one of them (I think it was a femur). A friend of mine (getting his phd in bioinfomatics) mentioned that they had managed to extract dinosaur proteins from this, and that because proteins are much more unstable then nucleic acids, it was entirely likely that they could extract dinosaur DNA from the specimen.

Also: Mammoth DNA

[Raul654]

Also, in case anyone missed it, a few months back, some researchers extracted enough woolly mammoth DNA from mammoth hairs to sequence it