Dino News

There's been a lot of news about dinosaurs recently, which is great for me, as I love them. The first news is that the first Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton to have been discovered is now on display in the Natural History Museum. This dinosaur was found in 1905, and was mistakenly called Dynamosaurus imperious in the same paper that T-rex was first described in. This mistake was soon realised, and can be explained by the fact that the Dynamosaurus skeleton was mixed in with other dinosaur bones. I was intrigued about what bones were mixed in with the skeleton, so I did a quick search and Google Books came up with this, on page 58 - Osborn (1905) named this partial skeleton Dynamosaurus imperious... in particular because of the osteoderms (now known to belong to an ankylosuar...). Osteoderms are bone deposits that form scales or plates on the skins of reptiles and dinosaurs. Ankylosaurs are herbivorous dinosaurs that are known for their plates and spikes on their backs. It is thought that some of these spikes from an ankylosaur were mixed in with the bones leading to the incorrect name of Dynamosaurus to be given.
T-rex's are tiny compared to the dinosaur giants, Sauropods, which are the second dinosaurs to be in the news. The T-rex would have come to knee height on the largest Sauropod, Argentinosaurus huinculensis, which the University of Manchester have been studying to determine how it would have walked. Argentinosaurus weighed in the region of 80 tonnes (that's at least 10 times bigger than the largest recorded elephant), and researchers wanted to find out how their muscles and bones managed to support and move their enormous bodies. There has been some controversy about their findings, as only its legs and part of its spine have been discovered, making it hard to accurately predict how it would have worked. Scientists mapped the muscles and tendons of Argentinosaurus using modern animals as a guide. This information was put into a computer, where a simulated dinosaur robot programmed how to use the muscles to walk (you can see the video on the BBC).

Argentinosaurus simulation

Argentinosaurus isn't the only Sauropod to have been in the news. A rare Diplodocus longus, called Misty, has been put on sale in Europe. It's 17 metres long and lived 150 million years ago, and was found in 2009 by the 11 and 14 year old sons of a palaeontologist. It took a team of palaeontologists nine weeks to dig out the skeleton that looks just like the one in London's Natural History Museum. The bones have been well conserved, allowing Misty to be relatively robust, and it would take two or three people a day to take her down and put her back up again. It's estimated to reach £400,000 to £600,000 when it goes up for auction on November 27th.

Misty the Diplodocus