I'm Back! And so Are They.

yeah...I was gone for a month. What of it? :P Work was suffocating, and I was finally nagged back into doing this.
Back to doing these daily.

Now, for today's topic (and a celebratory song about my return from one of my favourite childhood movies) re; the video below.



Yes, that's right. We're talking dinosaurs. The movie clip you saw is from the movie We're Back! Plotline includes the following; dinosaurs brought forward in time and made good by dino-cereal, sausages, a bubble producing wish maker, a howls-flying-castle machine, apes, an evil circus run by a guy named ScrewEye, competitive brothers, an absentminded museum director. All of it wrapped up in sweet pre-adolescent romance.

Really.

Now, anyone can tell you (especially my boyfriend BlueEyes) that I have an obsession with dinosaurs. I've watched every documentary, every show, and a million internet/book things. I collect dinosaur movies obsessively. I even used to have some dinosaur coprolite hanging around. That's fossilized feces, folks.

Also, I had a psychic tell me in a past-past life that I was an allosaurus. Which explains my temper.

More specifically today we're going to be talking about Dakota, one of my favourite dinosaurs of all time. Why this specific dinosaur? Why pick a Hadrosaur, one of the most common dinosaur skeletons ever found? Easy.

Dakota is one of the rarest dinosaur finds; a mummy. If that's not freaking awesome, I don't know what is. One of three dinosaurs mummies ever found, Dakota was discovered by 16 year old wanna-be paleontologist Tyler Lyson on his family farm in, you guessed it, Dakota. The body had survived sun, scavengers, weather and time, until it mineralized and survived millions of years. Upon acquiring his degree, he went back and excavated it, and the discovery was announced in 2007.


This is less-dead version of Dakota the Hadrosaur

Hadrosaurs were 8 tonne duck-billed dinosaurs that lived in the Late Cretaceous period. A common snack for t-rex, they were herbivores that stretched across Europe, North America, and Asia. Hadrosaurs were divided into many subgroups, the most popualr being the maiasaur, or the 'Good Mother Lizard'. Ducky from the land before time was also a hadrasaur; more specifically a parasaurolophus.




Most dinosaurs are known from their fragmented and scattered bones, so this kind of unheard-of-amazing-completely-complete-skin-organs-and-soft-tisse discovery rocked the science world and updated a lot of knowledge concerning hadrosaurs and the dinosaur world. Considered the most complete dinosaur find since 1908, it was the largest skin-imprint ever found and can tell us a lot about the movement, size, and speed of the dinosaur. Scientists even had to alter how they look at a hadrosaur; they walk differently then we first believed them to do.

I'm pretty sure that the mummy of a dinosaur is epic, and needs to explanation to why it is here on this blog. It's. A. Dinosaur. Mummy. Who DIDN'T play with dinosaur toys when they were a kid!?

If you want to learn more about the process of mummification, and the discovery and unearthing of a dinosaur mummy there are many articles on the web, as well as many documentaries. Here are some ones of interest that I highly suggest you check out.

Here's one about Dakota's autopsy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJZaOsnf5nI&NR=1

This one is entitled 'Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy'. While it doesn't talk about Dakota, it does speak of her contemporary, a juvenile male duck-billed dinosuar mummy named Leonardo. It's pretty fascinating stuff, and I suggest you look over it. He was found with his organs intact. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6weSeCsZLD8 <- Part 1.



Here are some of the autopsy reports of Dakota.

Until, next time.

-Bananahead.