In 1999, while fossil hunting in the Badlands of North Dakota, 16-year-old Tyler Lyson stumbled upon a mummified dinosaur: not just a skeleton, but a fossil that turned out to include naturally preserved soft-tissue structures. This year a group of scientists published the first in-depth analysis of this rare find from 67 million years ago.
The dinosaur—a hadrosaur, or duck-billed plant-eater —apparently died in a soggy spot. Minerals precipitated rapidly in its skin, forming a replacement framework before the soft organic tissues decomposed. “We actually have a three-dimensional organism preserved,” says study coauthor Roy Wogelius of the University of Manchester in England. Scales are visible to the naked eye; more remarkable, electron microscopy reveals double-layered skin similar to that of modern animals, and possibly even the outlines of cells. Wogelius, a geochemist who analyzes mineral surfaces, was asked to apply his expertise in infrared imaging to the fossil, nicknamed Dakota. ...
