Dinosaurs surprising by Claudia Sonea

In 1999 in North Dakota a fossilized duckbilled hadrosaur was found by Tyler Lyson, then a teenager who liked hunting for fossils on his family ranch. It is the most complete dinosaur mummies ever found and offers a totally different perspective on the size of dinosaurs and their intern structure, as well as their features. Although it is not as well preserved as the mummies of certain pharaohs or other people, because the body was fossilized into stone, it still offers researchers the opportunity to calculate its muscle mass and other aspects due to the fact that unlike the museum dinosaurs, this one has skin, ligaments, tendons and possibly some internal organs, according to researchers. The study of the mummy is yet to be completed, however some of the results found until now show that hadrosaurs were bigger (3 1/2 tons and up to 40 feet long) and stronger than expected. Furthermore, the hadrosaurus was more flexible and fast enough to outrun predators such as T. rex. Paleontologist Phillip Manning of Manchester University in England approached the issue of the dinosaur's skin and revealed that even though the color cannot be identified (in monochrome shows a striped pattern) it has a lot of detail and in modern reptiles the skin is usually associated with color change. After the discovery, the mummy was called Dakota, bearing the name of the region where it was found, and currently it is studied in the world's largest CT scanner (used for space shuttle engines and other large objects), operated by the Boeing Co, with a lot of precaution because soft parts of dead animals normally decompose rapidly after death. However, the chances of finding the DNA of the 65 million to 67 million years old dinosaur are small, according to Manning. Nevertheless, a Manchester colleague, Roy Wogelius, confesses that Dakota offers some organic molecular breakdown products, while Matthew Carrano, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, says that it's a progress that soft anatomy of dinosaurs can be studied. The last 8 years of study offered enough material for two books (DinoMummy: The Life, Death, and Discovery of Dakota, a Dinosaur From Hell Creek that goes on sale on Tuesday and an adult book called Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues and Hard Science due for January) and a television program, Dino Autopsy, airing on the National Geographic channel December 9. National Geographic Society partly funded the research that will make museums to rethink their dinosaur displays because the animal was actually longer than what is shown in a museum. Stay connected and don't forget to turn on TV on the 9th, it sounds as a promising TV documentary. Enjoy!

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071203/ap_on_sc/dinosaur_mummy;_ylt=Al_TxqTO8Ujl1USzuce7LcGs0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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