Dec
3
Saga of a dinosaur CAT scan
Filed Under Science, Recent stories
I made a rare foray into daily news over the weekend, with a story posted at Wired online about the discovery of a dinosaur “mummy.” (In quotes as it’s a naturally preserved dino, not mummified in the sense of ancient Egypt; so don’t get excited you old-earth creationist folks.) The short piece was actually many months in the making, although it might not look it. I found out about the discovery from National Geographic Television over the summer but have had to keep it under my hat since then.
Back in June, I flew down to Boeing’s research office, in the hills outside of Canoga Park, near Los Angeles, to observe the dinosaur heading into the company’s giant CT scanner. It didn’t go exactly as planned. The researchers, led by Phil Manning from the University of Manchester, had trucked the body from South Dakota, only to discover that they’d built a frame around it too wide to spin on the CT bed. As a result, most of the day was spent hacking and sawing away at the corners of the dino’s plaster, trying to shrink it enough to fit.
Eventually they wedged the tail piece — the mummy was split into the body block and the tail block — into the scanner and sealed up the massive steel door. After a couple hours they came up with the first images of the tail, at a resolution of a 20,000th of an inch. The body was scanned later, the first images from which Manning told me he just got last week. So despite the fanfare surrounding the announcement this week, the biggest discoveries are no doubt left to come.
All of which I would have told in a magazine piece, at much greater length, but for the restrictions National Geographic put on the information. Now you can read it in just about every news outlet on the planet, but at least I can say I’ve seen the world’s most complete dinosaur mummy — albeit entirely encased in plaster — in person.
If you’re at all interested in dinosaurs, it’s worth catching the show this weekend if you have the National Geographic Channel.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007
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