They've found an extraordinarily well preserved Dinosaur that has most of its soft tissues and bones encased in a layer of skin. They have a picture of the skin which has lost its colouring but kept its texture.
This find is staggeringly lucky fossils are rare requiring special circumstances this is even more rare and requires the creature not be eaten and fossilise before bacteria eat away at the flesh. It may tell us all sorts of things about dinosaurs.
Comments
Excellent news! Thanks for the link, mate! :)
You seemed more pleased than I imagine most people would be at this discovery Rob. Do you secretly harbour plans to create you own Jurassic Park in Reading?
Nice Fish. Jurassic Park is what we used to refer to Mill Hill as. Before they turned it into flats and built a Waitrose on the gasworks.
Who doesn't? :D
Seriously, though. It's hard not to get excited about this sort of thing. The find has already told us a tremendous amount about Hadrosours, and it promises to yield even more interesting information.
For example the well-muscled, runner's hind-end has turned people's perception of the creature upside-down, and that information feeds into what we know about extinct ecosystems as well; if what we'd assumed to be a plodding grazer was actually a capable sprinter, does that challenge our assumptions about other contemporary organisms? T. Rex probably preyed on hadrosaurs, but now we have a very real question about whether it could keep up with them. Does that mean we've underestimated it's running speed, or that it didn't run them down, but ambushed them instead? Or maybe it didn't prey on them at all. It's opened up a whole range of interesting questions, and suggests the answers to some of them. :)
Personally, I'm hoping that we see some fossilized soft-tissue that includes heart or lungs. I'd love someone to start to figure out the cardiovascular efficiency of large dinosaurs; that would really inform the speculation as to how active they were.