Running with the Dinosaurs

Mac Technology Helps Put the Spring in a Hadrosaur’s Step

Dakota’s fossilized skin, preserved by flooding and the deposition of minerals.
(Image courtesy National Geographic)

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.

Simulations of a dinosaur’s walking gait in ODE, an open-source physics engine. The Xgrid interface shows ODE running on 8 Mac Pro’s and the CPU monitor showing the processors working on the local systems.

Some of this groundbreaking research is taking place today. While paleontologists remove the sediment from Dakota grain by grain, Apple technology is helping to recreate his living persona – his actions, his movements, his walking and running gaits – at the University of Manchester.

Digitizing Dakota

Dakota, by all accounts, was a placid, 7000-pound duck-billed creature who grazed swamplands with other vegetation-eaters. But his (or her) emergence as a mummy touched off intense scientific activity. The team used petroleum exploration scanning technology (LiDAR) and software to create a 3D outcrop map before excavating. They then pulled the mummy free in blocks - the body block alone weighing 10 tons. A front-end loader lifted the blocks onto a flatbed truck and Dakota was hauled away for a first-of-its-kind adventure.

“Paleontology isn’t about a bunch of guys at the bottom of a dirty hole digging up bones. It’s dino CSI”

Dakota has the distinction of being the largest object ever to be micro CT-scanned. After his weight and mass had been drastically reduced by the removal of much of the entombing sediment, he was trucked to the Boeing facility in Canoga Park, California, where his 12,000-pound body block was placed on a NASA scanner normally used to examine rocket engines from the space shuttle Orbiter. Each slice of the scan took 45 minutes at 3500 RAD (you might receive 3 or 4 RAD when you get a chest X-ray). NASA used a 9 MeV linear accelerator source to generate the necessary X-rays, and as a safety measure cordoned off an entire block around the building despite its six-feet-thick walls. The scanning process took six months, and NASA is still processing the data down to manageable size. Manning, a certified Mac enthusiast, visited Canoga Park with his MacBook Pro to work through the preliminary data.

“I put a terabyte drive on the back of my MacBook Pro to hold data from the scanner,” says Manning. “I bumped the RAM up to 4GB to open up some of these really big images slice by slice to see what we’d got.” Each of the 500 slices is packed with information on the body and tail blocks.

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