Dino mummies had thick skins

摘要

For dinosaur hunters, finding fossils with soft tissue and even their last meals intact has been like hitting the jackpot. Now it seems that the much-hyped dinosaur "mummies" were merely thick-skinned, suggesting that more may be found than palaeontologists had previously expected. Eric Lund of the Utah Museum of Natural History examined over a dozen newly discovered mummies in southern Utah. His analysis showed that these and other fossils all came from sand deposited in river beds that also contained remnants of wood and leaves - signs of a moist environment. This means it was too wet to dry out and mummify a dinosaur carcass, he told the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Cleveland last week. "It doesn't look like desiccation," he said.