THE PAGE TURNS

April 28, 2024April 28, 2024

U is for Utah

Author’s note: We are down to the last six posts of the alphabet. You may have noticed that they’re going to slide a few days into May, so not technically finishing in A to Z April. Still, let’s finish this alphabetic journey about dinosaurs … we are on the home stretch!

Geology Utah, dinosaurs discovered across the variety of ages.

Normally, I would not be touting tourist information for any particular place, and certainly not gathering or sharing information from a chamber of commerce-y site. But this is about dinosaurs and that site is Utah. Utah is a dinosaur place. So is Wyoming and so is Colorado. And China, Argentina, Mongolia. Those are your international dinosaur hot spots.

(Gosh, I sure would like to go Ulaanbataar and see their dinosaur fossils and Chinggis Khan artifacts. How am I ever going to convince my spouse that would be the next great vacation, when we haven’t even been to Paris or Germany or Prague or Madrid… hmmm… anyway.)

There’s just no getting around it. Utah was prime real estate for capturing fossils from almost all significant ages. It also has the second-most different types of dinosaurs discovered, only behind China.

April 26, 2024May 5, 2024

T is for T. rex

Feathered TRex from Everything Dinosaur blog (2018)

Mr. T!

Why wasn’t in named T. regina? (Tyrannosaurus regina, Queen of the dinosaurs?) I suppose that’s a pipe dream. Consider who discovered them first and named them first. Women weren’t in charge of naming at the time.

He was a formidable guy. And there were a lot of him around, as the world seems to be full of many T. rex and general tyrannosaurus species specimens. They’re finding them practically every year out in the deserts of China and Montana. T. rex is arguably the most popular dinosaur, the best known. Plus, people love to make fun of those tiny arms.

The History of the Finding

The first person to find T. rex fossils was named after P.T. Barnum, circus showman, which seems appropriate. His name was Barnum Brown, and he was the new naturalist running the brand spanking new American Museum of Natural History in New York. They had a bit of funding, so Barnum was out in the west digging for bones. And he found them.

April 25, 2024April 25, 2024

S is for Skin

Dinosaurs had a lot of skin in the game, even though it’s rather hard to find it 200 million years later. They did have a lot of skin in general. That process of fossilization I described back in letter “F” replaces bone with minerals, though. Skin has to be preserved in a completely different way. It must be mummified, i.e., geologically captured in a unique set of circumstances that don’t allow it be replaced with anything. Skin is tricky to discover.

But there are a few examples, and they can tell us plenty about what the reptile rulers were like.

The preserved *Borealopelta*, photo on Reddit.

Dino-Mummies

It’s difficult for dinosaur skin to be found intact, but miners in Canada managed to find an exquisitely preserved–it can hardly be called anything else–nearly full skin, complete with horn edges and the face of a type of ankylosaur. This was a nodosaur that they called Borealopelta, meaning “northern shield,” in reference to its discovery origin and covering.

The circumstances of preservation were unusual. Our Borealopelta fell into water when it died, then flipped upside-down. That wasn’t particularly odd as corpses do float after death, typically filling with gases. Perhaps because its thick top layer was so much heavier than the dead, soft underside, the dead animal turned belly-side up, then sank into the mud. It was held fast and did not decay, the sands inside the water acting in this case as a mummifying agent rather than as a conduit to replace living tissue with rock.

When the Canadian paleontologist pulled it out they saw a beautiful set of scales, clearly defining the horns that had long been known as stubborn resistance to predators. Yet they also found something else in the skin. There were remnants of skin-marking melanosomes, the organic things that create coloration and pigmentation.