Bringing Back the Dinosaurs... Sort Of...

Picture of a hadrosaur based off of findings from the dinosaur mummy "Leonardo".

In our last post we discussed how it has recently been discovered that some dinosaur fossils contain remnants of soft dinosaur tissue. In this post we will discuss the discovery of a fossilized dinosaur mummy.  Specifically, this dinosaur is a hydrosaur, or a duckbilled dinosaur, that died and was quickly buried in sediments before it could decay.  The burial process mummified the dinosaur, preventing decay and eventually the mummy was fossilized.  This dinosaur mummy is different from say human Egyptian mummies in that the dinosaur is actually fossilized and rock.  Egyptian mummies are simply well preserved tissues of the human that died.  As a result of the dinosaur mummy fossilizing, all of the parts of the dinosaur present in the mummy are still present today in rock form.  The process of fossilization of dinosaur mummies is exceedingly rare and have only been found a handful of times.  The awesome thing about mummies is that they preserve the soft tissues such as internal organs or skin which normally decay away long before any scientist can observe them.  The difficulty with fossilized mummies though is the fact that all of the soft tissues are now actually rock, which obviously is extremely difficult to dissect.  The documentary movie "Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy" shows how modern day paleontologists "dissected" Leonardo without hacking him up.  The movie is a great demonstration of real scientists doing real science.  As a result of the "dissection", the scientists were able to find out all kinds of interesting biology about the dinosaur.  Huge changes in what we believe about dinosaurs in how they look and how their body functions have come about because of the investigation shown in this movie.  Also interesting, since the movie has been filmed, soft tissues like we talked about in our last post also have been found in Leonardo. 

Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy
 

Actual fossilized dinosaur mummy "Leonardo".

Is Jurassic Park Possible? Bringing Back the Dinosaurs

Dinosaur soft tissue found in a fossilized T-Rex leg bone.

Is Jurassic Park really possible?  For nearly twenty years scientists have been telling us that the science behind the movie Jurassic Park is possible in theory, but not really possible in practice.  Why?  No one has ever or would ever be able to find intact dinosaur DNA from ancient fossilized bones, or mosquitoes for that matter.  Oddly though, about the time the movie was coming out, a paleontologist discovered the remains of some organic soft dinosaur tissue in a fossilized dinosaur bone.  How in the world would tissue survive such long periods of time and the fossilization process?  The answer to that question is that no one really knows, but several scientists working independently of each other have been able to verify the presence of dinosaur tissues in fossilized bones.  Organic molecules, including blood cells, have been found and confirmed in these specimens.  These samples open up a totally new area of paleontology and biology that has previously never been open for scientific examination before.  For example, through the examination of protein sequences, specifically collagin, scientists have been able to find that dinosaurs were closely related to birds.   Several different proteins have also been found in these fossils.  These proteins may open doors to understanding dinosaur physiology such as if they were warm or cold blooded.  Currently though, the field of studying ancient tissues from fossilized specimens is still highly controversial.  Even though there has been a lot of evidence to support the existence of this tissue and that it is not simply environmental contamination, the fact remains that it is still nearly unbelievable that organic soft tissues would survive decay over such long periods of time.  Though proteins have been found, no intact DNA has been found.  This makes sense considering protein molecules are significantly more stable than DNA.  So unfortunately, the search for dinosaur DNA and for Jurassic Park continues.  But with this discovery, we will get a lot closer to determining what a real dinosaur was like and what a real Jurassic Park would be like.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur.html

In my next post I will discuss another, even more recent dinosaur finding which is even more amazing than this discovery.