Dinosaur soft tissue preserved!
This is like the coolest thing ever. It’s a dinosaur that had been (somehow) naturally mummified… preserving soft tissue in addition to bones. We have all these fossilized dinosaur skeletons, but the other stuff we hang on them in our drawings and speculations are based on some combination of general biological principles and fancy (and, I don’t doubt, deduction from indirect clues in the bones). But here we’ve got a bit of a dinosaur where some of the rest of it was preserved!
Cue “Jurassic Park” theme music.
When I was a kid, until about age 8 or 9, I was going to be a paleontologist. I mean, lots of kids are dinosaur freaks, but I was a dinosaur freak. I was known for it at school. Somewhere starting around age 9 I started to really get into space, though…. Not totally out of that phase. (The computer phase started at about age 11 or 12, and I’m not out of that one either.)
(Hat tip: BoingBoing.)
December 3rd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Definitely a freak. At that age, I just wanted to be a paleomammalogist (or, more precisely, “paleomastozoólogo”, which is the word I used).
December 3rd, 2007 at 5:30 pm
One of the articles I read had some really adorable quotes from one of the scientists about how awesome the skin is … something along the lines of, “ooooh, the skin is really nice.” I never went through a dinosaur phase as a kid myself (or a space/planets phase, for that matter), but imagining paleantologists getting giddy over a well preserved speciman makes the excitement more understandable to me than “oh yeah these animals were big but now they are dead.”