In 1999, while fossil hunting in the Badlands of North Dakota, 16-year-old Tyler Lyson stumbled upon a mummi- fied dinosaur: not just a skeleton, but a fossil that turned out to include naturally preserved soft-tissue structures. This year a group of scientists published the first in-depth analysis of this rare find from 67 million years ago. The dinosaur—a hadrosaur, or duck-billed plant-eater —apparently died in a soggy spot. Minerals precipitated rapidly in its skin, forming a replacement framework before the soft organic tissues decomposed. “We actually have a three-dimensional organism preserved,” says study coauthor Roy Wogelius of the University of Manchester in England. Scales are visible to the naked eye; more remarkable, electron microscopy reveals double-layered skin similar to that of modern animals, and possibly even the outlines of cells. Wogelius, a geochemist who analyzes mineral surfaces, was asked to apply his expertise in infrared imaging to the fossil, nicknamed Dakota. He found that its mummified remains appear to include some of the creature’s original amino acids, although there are no traces of whole proteins or DNA. The results were pub- lished online in July in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The generous surface area of Dakota’s skin suggests that there was a lot more muscle packed into the animal’s tail than previously believed. On the basis of the new infor- mation, researchers now estimate that this hadrosaur could have run roughly 27 miles per hour. That is “a lot faster than a T. rex,” Wogelius’s colleague Phil Manning says. Manning suspects that skin and soft tissue may have been overlooked in other fossils and that they could yield startling new insights about ancient creatures. “I think there are specimens in museums today that are time capsules,” he says. “We could go back to these specimens and breathe new life into those old bones.” MEGAN TALKINGTON Dino Mummy Spills Its Secrets
To forecasters trying to anticipate extreme
weather and avert disasters, the 2004 hurricane season looked like nature thumbing
her nose at us. That year, 15 major storms
developed in the North Atlantic—including
Hurricane Ivan, which caused $14 billion in
damage in the United States. And yet the
best models had called for a quiet season
because it was a year of El Niño, a recurring
pattern of warm water in the eastern Pacific
Ocean. That pattern is associated with
lower-than-average tropical storm activity
in the North Atlantic. Atmospheric scientist
Peter Webster at the Georgia Institute of
Technology set out to determine what went
wrong, and now he has some answers.
Last spring, Webster discovered that
his colleagues had lumped together two
distinct weather patterns under the name
of El Niño. Those patterns “have a very, very
different impact on the tropical climate and,
most important, on hurricane formation,”
he says. The divergence appears to be a
recent phenomenon, which explains why
researchers were unaware of its effects.
During a typical El Niño, the Pacific Ocean
warms up in a long band that extends
from the coast of South America toward
Polynesia. The second, less familiar pattern
involves a more isolated, extensive patch of
warmer water in the central Pacific.
After examining more than six decades’
worth of ocean surface temperatures
and tropical storm data, Webster and
his collaborators realized that the
newly identified warming in the central
Pacific produces more hurricanes than a
traditional El Niño. It did not show up in
the data until three decades ago, leaving
Webster unsure whether the new weather
pattern is part of a long-term oscillation
or a result of climate change. Regardless
of the root cause, though, the discovery
of the central Pacific hot spot should lead
to better hurricane predictions and fewer
surprises. ELIZA STRICKLAND
48Twin
Black Holes
Found
Black holes are weird
enough, but in March
astronomers found
signs of something even
stranger: twin massive
black holes orbiting
tightly around each other.
Such objects have been
long predicted but
never veri;ed.
Todd Boroson and Tod
Lauer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson found what
they think is a dual black
hole while examining more
than 17,000 quasars in the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey,
which obtained data,
images, and spectra of
more than one-fourth of
the sky. The two objects (a
20-million-solar-mass hole
and a billion-solar-mass
partner) seem to be separated by just one-third of
a light-year, less than one-tenth the distance from the
sun to the closest star.
In theory the universe
should be littered with
black hole multiples. All
sizable galaxies are thought
to be born with black
holes at their centers, and
each time galaxies collide
and merge the expanded
galaxy should collect a new
one. But binary black holes
are dif;cult to ;nd. Astronomers have found dozens of
quasars with similar double
lines of emission, but the
signatures are usually
attributed either to a single
black hole or to two galaxies passing close together.
Boroson and Lauer are
optimistic that they have
the real deal this time.
“We’re convinced it is
different from every other
object we’ve studied,”
Boroson says. STEPHEN ORNES
