And the new findings might help settle a long-running debate about whether dinosaurs were warmblooded, coldblooded-or both. “It’s great science.” The observations could shed new light on how dinosaurs evolved and how their muscles and blood vessels worked. We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid,” says dinosaur paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr., of the University of Maryland. “The reason it hasn’t been discovered before is no right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens. Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors. After all, as any textbook will tell you, when an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. The finding amazed colleagues, who had never imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. rex bone-the first observation of its kind. It was big news indeed last year when Schweitzer announced she had discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. ![]() “Cool beans,” she says, looking at the image on the screen. “I am, like, really excited.”Īfter 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. Surely that is an image that Spielberg could do something with.Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels. The feathers were replaced with scales as the animals aged and grew larger. A related tyrannosauroid from China was found to have proto-feathers, and it has been proposed that young T. Rex skeleton discovered came from an individual that weighed only about 30 kg and was perhaps two years old at death. Rex weighed over 5000 kilograms, but the animals did not start out life as monsters. Rex had huge hind legs, surprisingly small albeit powerful fore- limbs and a huge head, with jaws that had a crushing power several times greater that of a great white shark. Ross blames pop culture, although he credits Stephen Spielberg's Jurassic Park for portraying a more realistic version of the dinosaurs. Not surprisingly, the students got it wrong 63% of pre-college and 72% of college students drew an upright T. Rex like monster, made its first appearance in 1954, and has gone on to be one of the most famous and profitable fictional characters ever, starring in at least 28 movies, and has appeared as well in comic books and TV series, both in its ancestral home of Japan and in the U.S.Ĭornell paleontologist Robert Ross and his colleagues recently performed a survey of students in which they were asked to draw a picture of T. Rex has spawned a multitude of comic book imitations and as well as Hollywood versions that have starred in untold numbers of bad science fiction films. Of course, it is not all the fault of the museums. Yale's Peabody museum is still happy to sell you coffee mugs and other memorabilia in which the dinosaur is depicted erect as in Rudolph Zallinger's famous mural, The Age of Reptiles. In any case, damage was done the sight of that huge erect dinosaur had already been imprinted on several generations. But the museums took decades to correct their error. Since the 1960s, scientists have realized that the upright pose could not be correct in reality, the dinosaur's body was held more or less horizontal, with its tail balancing out its huge head, both cantilevered out from the huge rear legs. Rex skeleton installed at the Carnegie Museum in 1942 was similarly displayed, standing nearly 40 feet tall. The tripod pose was scientifically in error, but nearly 100 years later, students still can't get it right.Ī T. ![]() In 1915, paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn presented the world with a nearly complete skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex, towering over an exhibit space at the American Museum of Natural History, standing up straight like a kangaroo and balancing on its tail. An accurate skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex Holotype specimen lumbers through the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh (Image: Wikipedia commons, by Scott Robert Anselmo)
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