Post #4711

Mummified Dinosaur Duo Prove They Had Hooves, Marking “The First Confirmed Hooved Reptile” For the first time ever, we’ve been able to prove that some dinosaurs had hooves, thanks to two remarkably well-preserved mummified dinosaurs retrieved from Wyoming’s Badlands. The specimens are the duck-billed dinosaurs Edmontosaurus annectens that, thanks to a "fluke preservation event" are near-perfect 66 million years later. Known as “clay templating,” that process essentially encased the dinosaurs shortly after burial with a mask of clay no thicker than 1/100th of an inch, or about 0.3 millimeters. “This is a mask, a template, a clay layer so thin you could blow it away,” said senior author Paul Sereno, PhD, Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago in a statement. “It was attracted to the outside of the carcass in a fluke event of preservation.” Using hospital and micro-CT scans, thin sections, X-ray spectroscopy, clay analyses, and examination of the discovery site, a team of scientists were able to figure out how that “fluke event” played out. After death, the dinosaurs were briefly baked under the Sun before a flash flood submerged their carcasses. A thin biofilm then covered their fleshy surface and electrostatically pulled clay out of the wet sediment, forming a wafer-thin layer that would preserve them in three dimensions. The result is two unprecedented specimens that have already provided a glut of dinosaur firsts. Source:IFLScience @EverythingScience