The duck-billed dinosaurs have been giving up their secrets lately. Just yesterday researchers revealed new details of how hadrosaurs chewed their food, using a set of teeth that look like a "cranial cuisinart." Today, paleontologists have put the hadrosaur's skin on display, thanks to a "mummified" creature that shows the shape of its soft tissue and cell-like structures.
Such a discovery was possible because the dinosaur's skin fossilized before bacteria had a chance to eat up the tissue. It is "absolutely amazing to be able to identify organic molecules from soft tissue that belonged to a beast that died over 66 million years ago.... This is the closest you're going to get to patting the animal" [National Geographic News]
, says lead researcher Phillip Manning. For the study, which will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers used advanced imaging techniques to get under the hadrosaur's ...
