Monday, May 12, 2008 8:04 PM CDT
REVIEW: 'Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues and Hard Science' By Phillip Manning
Review by Jerry W. Ellis
A recent and exciting discovery of a dinosaur “mummy” that promises to greatly expand our understanding of dinosaurs was the motivation for writing this book.
You may recall a short article in the Times-Courier Dec. 3, 2007, describing this discovery and announcing the release of the book being reviewed here. Phillip Manning is a paleontologist from England.
The subject of this book is a plant-eating hadrosaur mummy, discovered in 1999 by a high school student, Tyler Lyson, in the Hell Creek Formation in the Badlands of North Dakota. Other dinosaur mummies have been known since 1884, but most of the skin impressions were unknowingly destroyed just to get out the skeleton.
The unique feature of this fossil is that the nearly complete fossilized skin wasn’t collapsed against the bones as earlier ones were. This means that the size or mass of the entire soft-tissue part of the hadrosaur can be estimated giving information that has, heretofore, been exceedingly difficult to obtain.
Various chapters deal with introductory topics and the excavation and moving of the tail block and huge body block to a laboratory of the Black Hills Institute for preparation and study. Experimental obstacles have delayed the CT analysis of the entire body and tail, so those results weren’t included in the book. However, some later chapters reveal some very exciting results of related studies.
Dinosaur tracks showing skin on the bottom of the feet have been found in Alberta, Canada. A huge field of eggs discovered in 1998 in Patagonia was estimated to cover a square mile and was 16 feet deep in some places. Dinosaur eggs have provided fossilized embryos and some eggs have given embryos with “finely beaded skin in 3-dimensions.”
The idea of organic substances lasting long enough to be found in fossils has always been rejected. Yet, petroleum is a complex mixture of organic compounds, mostly hydrocarbons, that was formed millions of years ago. Coal also contains ancient organic substances.
With that realization in mind, paleontologist Mary Schweitzer began searching for evidence for organic substances in fossils. Her analyses of fossilized dinosaur eggshells suggested that “breakdown products of original dinosaur proteins were still present in the eggshells.” This shows that at least traces of proteins have lasted more than 80 million years!
Fossilized bones are solid throughout, while actual bones are hollow. In a rare find in 2000, a 67 million-year-old T. rex fossilized bone that was discovered to be hollow. From it Schweitzer was able to isolate a “flexible, resilient, elastic material, fibrous and vascular in form,” apparently bone marrow soft tissue, and very much like that she isolated from marrow from the modern ostrich, which is remotely related to T. rex.
Additional experiments revealed small “round microstructures, dark red to brown in color” and “virtually identical in size and appearance to red blood cells similarly isolated from modern ostrich bones.”
Schweitzer also isolated protein type substances from mastodon and T. rex bones. Colleagues at the Harvard Medical School confirmed that amino acid chains found in collagen were present in both samples and the fragments from the mastodon were like those of the modern elephant, while those from the T. rex were more like those from modern chickens.
However, DNA is a much more delicate substance and is easily destroyed so it is very unlikely any complete molecule will be found. Thus, the “Jurassic Park” strategy of generating dinosaurs from ancient DNA is not likely to be realized.
Ellis is a retired professor of chemistry from Eastern Illinois University.
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