In 1999, a youngster named Tyler Lyson was hunting for fossils on
his uncle’s ranch, a favorite occupation since his elementary school
days, when he came across hadrosaur vertebrae. Hadrosaur remains are
not uncommon in the North Dakota badlands, so Lyson made a note of the
find and moved on.
In 2004, after an unproductive dig at
another site, Lyson and his team from the Marmarth Research Foundation
went back to the vertebrae, dug some more, and soon discovered that the
greenish-grey rock they had struck was dinosaur gold. A team member
returning to the University of Manchester alerted Professor Phillip
Manning, who went to see for himself.
“I realized when I
first cast my eyes over the skin it wasn’t a trace fossil,” says
Manning. “It wasn’t a skin impression; it was fossilized skin. We were
dealing with one of the rarest moments in geological history –dinosaur
soft tissue preservation.”
Since the first dinosaur
discovery 100 years ago, paleontologists have coveted soft tissue
impressions. They have had to make do with patches of skin or the
delicate traces of skin draped over fossil bone. The remains are
typically crushed and decayed, often beyond recognition. But this
hadrosaur, now known as Dakota, was mummified in a fetal position,
apparently after a swift burial by soft sands at the edge of a river
system. Its skin was rapidly replaced by minerals to become iron-hard,
and its 30-foot body retained much of its original shape. “It looked
inflated,” says Manning, “and the skin had form, depth, and structure.
I told Tyler, ‘We need to treat this as a crime scene investigation.’”
The
Manchester team continues to work closely with Lyson, who is now
studying for his PhD at Yale. His find provides a wealth of data that
generations of paleontologists can explore to understand the grave
secrets of a very special dinosaur.