If your best idea of what dinosaurs looked like comes from the Jurassic Park movies, new research out of the University of Chicago is here to provide a clearer picture. Published in Science, the paper describes two duck-billed dinosaur “mummies” discovered in Wyoming that were preserved in such detail they’ve given scientists a newly comprehensive look at their external anatomy — including, for the first time, the presence of hoofed feet.
“It’s the first time we’ve had a complete, fleshed-out view of a large dinosaur that we can really feel confident about,” senior author Paul Sereno said in a news release. “The badlands in Wyoming where the finds were made is a unique ‘mummy zone’ that has more surprises in store from fossils collected over years of visits by teams of university undergrads.”
So what exactly are the newly excavated dinosaur mummies? They’re not quite the same type of mummy as what you’d find in an Egyptian tomb, as the specimens don’t contain any organic material from the animals, which walked the Earth some 66 million years ago. Rather, in a process called clay templating, a thin layer of clay less than 1/100th of an inch thick coated the carcasses’ skin, leaving impressions that scientists used to create renderings of what the living dinos may have looked like. The team determined that after the creatures died, a flash flood covered their carcasses in the clay film.
“This is a mask, a template, a clay layer so thin you could blow it away,” Sereno said. “It was attracted to the outside of the carcass in a fluke event of preservation.”
And skin — covered in tiny, pebble-like scales — wasn’t the only element the team was able to make images of. They also identified a row of spikes running down the tail and hooves on the dinosaurs, a juvenile and a young adult. “There are so many amazing ‘firsts’ preserved in these duck-billed mummies — the earliest hooves documented in a land vertebrate, the first confirmed hoofed reptile, and the first hoofed four-legged animal with different forelimb and hindlimb posture,” Sereno said. He also told the Associated Press that the younger dino is the first juvenile to have been found mummified.
But the hooves, featuring a wedge shape with three hind toes and a flat bottom like a horse’s, might be the most astounding part of the discovery. The duck-billed dinos, also known by their scientific name, Edmontosaurus annectens, may have evolved them to increase traction and absorb shock, as the creatures likely ran on two legs but walked on all fours, Sereno told Reuters.
“It’s for hard land, efficiently walking — maybe even running — over the surface,” he said, adding, “The only animal we can even point at as a parallel or an analog is a kangaroo.”
To find the specimens, the scientists ventured to an area of the badlands where two other duck-billed dino mummies had been discovered in the early 1900s. Once they’d excavated the new fossils, the team used an array of techniques — including 3D surface imaging, CT scans, and the analysis of contemporary footprints — to characterize the fleshy anatomy. Digital artists later joined in to reconstruct the dinos’ appearance and movement.
Looking ahead, Sereno plans to conduct similar analyses on fossils of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops that were also unearthed in the mummy zone, which could lead to more fascinating findings. For instance, the former indicates that T. rexes may have been feathered, and Sereno said the fossil “doesn’t even have scales.” The study authors also want to search for similar specimens in the mummy zone and beyond, and aim to conduct further research on the clay templating process.
But for now, the recent research “may be the single best paper I’ve released,” Sereno said in the news release, noting, “I believe it’s worth taking the time to assemble a dream team in order to generate science that can be appreciated by the general public. We’ve never been able to look at the appearance of a large prehistoric reptile like this — and just in time for Halloween.”
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