December 04, 2007	Tuesday	Ziqa'ad 23, 1428

WASHINGTON: One of the most complete dinosaur mummies ever found is revealing secrets locked away for millions of years, bringing researchers as close as they will ever get to touching a live dinosaur.

The fossilised duckbilled hadrosaur is so well preserved that scientists have been able to calculate its muscle mass and learn that it was more muscular than thought, probably giving it the ability to outrun predators such as a tyrannosaurus rex.

While they call it a mummy, the dinosaur is not really preserved like King Tut was. The dinosaur body has been fossilised into stone. Unlike the collections of bones found in museums, this hadrosaur came complete with skin, ligaments, tendons and possibly some internal organs, according to researchers.

The study is not yet complete, but scientists have concluded that hadrosaurs were bigger — 3.5 tons and up to 40 feet long — and stronger than had been known, were quick and flexible and had skin with scales that may have been striped.

“Oh, the skin is wonderful,” paleontologist Phillip Manning of Manchester University in England rhapsodised, admitting to a “glazed look in my eye.”

“It’s unbelievable when you look at it for the first time,” he said. “There is depth and structure to the skin. The level of detail expressed in the skin is just breathtaking.”

Manning said there is a pattern of banding to the larger and smaller scales on the skin. Because it has been fossilised researchers do not know the skin colour. Looking at it in monochrome shows a striped pattern.

The fossil was found in 1999 in the US state of North Dakota and now is nicknamed “Dakota.” It is being analysed in the world’s largest CT scanner, operated by the Boeing Co. The machine usually is used for space shuttle engines and other large objects. Researchers hope the technology will help them learn more about the fossilised insides of the creature.

Soft parts of dead animals normally decompose rapidly after death. Because of chemical conditions where this animal died, fossilisation — replacement of tissues by minerals — took place faster than the decomposition, leaving mineralised portions of the tissue.

That does not mean DNA, the building blocks of life, can be recovered, Manning said. Some has been recovered from frozen mammoths up to 1 million years old, he said. At the age of this dinosaur, 65 million to 67 million years old, “the chance of finding DNA is remote,” he said.

Matthew Carrano, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said he could not comment in detail about the find because he had not seen the research. But, he added, “Any time we can get a glimpse of the soft anatomy of a dinosaur, that’s significant.”

The findings from Dakota may cause museums to rethink their dinosaur displays.

Most dinosaur skeletons in museums, for example, show the vertebrae right next to one another. The researchers looking at Dakota found a gap of about a centimeter between each one. That indicates there may have been a disk or other material between them, allowing more flexibility and meaning the animal was actually longer than what is shown in a museum. On large animals, adding the space could make them a yard longer or more, Manning said.

Because ligaments and tendons were preserved, as well as other parts of Dakota, researchers could to calculate its muscle mass, showing it was stronger and potentially faster than had been known.

They estimated the hadrosaur’s top speed at about 28 miles per hour, 10 mph faster than the giant T. rex is thought to have been able to run.

“It’s very logical, though, that a hadrosaur could run faster than a T. rex.” Manning said.—AP