Getting under a dinosaur's skin.Paleontologists spend their careers trying to reconstruct animals from meager mea·ger also mea·gre adj. 1. Deficient in quantity, fullness, or extent; scanty. 2. Deficient in richness, fertility, or vigor; feeble: the meager soil of an eroded plain. 3. piles of bones, but recent discoveries of fossilized fos·sil·ize v. fos·sil·ized, fos·sil·iz·ing, fos·sil·iz·es v.tr. 1. To convert into a fossil. 2. To make outmoded or inflexible with time; antiquate. v.intr. dinosaur skin are providing researchers with a whole new feel for these ancient behemoths. "This is about as close as you can get to petting a dinosaur," says Brian G. Anderson of the Mesa (Ariz.) Southwest Museum The Southwest Museum is a museum, library, and archive located in the Mt. Washington area of Los Angeles, California. Its collections deal mainly with the American Indian. . In the Dec. 28, 1998 JOURNAL OF VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY The Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology (JVP) was founded in 1980 at the University of Oklahoma by Dr. Jiri Zidek. It is a scientific journal that publishes original contributions on all aspects of the vertebrate paleontology, including vertebrate origins, evolution, functional , Anderson and his colleagues describe a set of exquisite skin impressions associated with bones from a hadrosaur, or duckbilled dinosaur. Found in southwest New Mexico New Mexico, state in the SW United States. At its northwestern corner are the so-called Four Corners, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet at right angles; New Mexico is also bordered by Oklahoma (NE), Texas (E, S), and Mexico (S). , the impressions provide the best look yet at the outer covering of hadrosaurs, says coauthor Spencer G. Lucas Spencer G. Lucas is an American paleontologist and stratigrapher, and curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. His main areas of study are late Paleozoic, Mesozoic and early Cenozoic vertebrate fossils, stratigraphy, and continental deposits, of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History in Albuquerque. The fossils have small ridged bumps that look like miniature mountain peaks. "That skin would have felt like running your hand over a knobby mountain bike tire," says Lucas. In a related discovery reported in the Nov. 19, 1998 NATURE, researchers in Patagonia found fossilized dinosaur embryos, complete with skin impressions. These embryos were the first discovered for the four-footed giant herbivores known as sauropods. The recent discoveries feed into a growing interest in the exterior of dinosaurs. "It's causing us to look at the way we name dinosaurs," says Kenneth Carpenter of the Denver Museum of Natural History. Paleontologists designate dinosaur species by bones alone, but many modern animal species are defined by their skin or feathers and cannot be distinguished solely from their bones. As researchers collect more examples of skin fossils, says Carpenter, "we may see that there is a lot more variation among dinosaurs." |
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