Picture this: you’re sixteen years old, wandering around your uncle’s ranch in the North Dakota badlands, when something unusual catches your eye poking out of a hillside. Most teenagers might have walked right past it, but Tyler Lyson had been fascinated with dinosaurs since childhood. What he discovered in 1999 would later become one of the most significant paleontological finds in history – a mummified dinosaur that would challenge everything scientists thought they knew about these ancient creatures.
A Teenage Fossil Hunter’s Remarkable Find
Lyson, then a high school student on his family’s North Dakota property, initially spotted what appeared to be hadrosaur vertebrae at the base of a hill. However, he didn’t immediately investigate the site in detail. It wasn’t until 2004 that he returned to excavate his find, and what he uncovered would astound the paleontological world. When Lyson began seriously examining the fossil, he quickly realized he had found something extraordinary – a dinosaur with preserved soft tissue.
The Miracle of Preservation
The Miracle of Preservation (image credits: wikimedia)
Dakota, as the specimen came to be known, wasn’t technically mummified in the traditional sense but was actually a fossil of a mummified dinosaur, where the animal’s dried tissues had been transformed to rock through fossilization. The discovery was nothing short of miraculous when you consider the astronomical odds against such preservation.
Dinosaur fossils with Dakota’s degree of preservation are extremely rare because many different factors must come together perfectly – the carcass must first escape scavengers and degradation by the elements, then a chemical process must mineralize the tissue before bacteria can eat it, and finally, the remains must survive millions of years undamaged. According to Stephen Begin, a Michigan consultant on the project, Dakota was only the fifth dinosaur mummy ever found that was “of any significance.”
Meeting the Scientific Powerhouse
When Lyson realized the significance of his discovery, he reached out to Dr. Phillip Manning, a British paleontologist at the University of Manchester. Manning, who would later become a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee, was so excited by the find that he declared the specimen “exceeds the jackpot.”
The collaboration between the young American fossil hunter and the experienced British scientist led to the site being excavated in the summer of 2006. The excavation was massive in scope – the team pulled almost fifteen tons of initial material from the site, which preparators and researchers would eventually whittle down to about five tons. The international team that assembled around Dakota represented a new model of scientific collaboration in paleontology.
Advanced Technology Reveals Ancient Secrets
Manning’s team used cutting-edge technology, including a large-scale CT scanner provided by NASA and the Boeing Company, to generate high-resolution scans of the preserved muscles and tendons – the scan of the 3,600-kilogram body was one of the largest CT scans ever undertaken. This wasn’t your typical hospital CT scanner; this was industrial-grade equipment normally used to examine space shuttle parts.
The use of the world’s largest CT scanner, operated by the Boeing Company in California and used to examine space shuttle parts, allowed researchers to get an unprecedented look at what was encased in the rumpled mass of sandstone. Thanks to electron microscopy, infrared spectroscopy, x-ray analysis, and a battery of other tests, Manning’s team spent three years applying every possible kind of modern analytical technology to confirm their extraordinary findings about the preserved skin envelope.
Revolutionary Speed Calculations
One of Dakota’s most groundbreaking contributions came from what the preserved soft tissues revealed about hadrosaur locomotion. Because the intervertebral discs spacing out the spinal column of the tail had been fossilized, researchers could calculate its length more accurately, and the preservation of muscles and tendons allowed them to calculate the dinosaur’s mass.
With the aid of CT scanning, researchers determined how much muscle mass was packed between the bone and skin of Dakota’s tail, allowing them to infer that the dinosaur’s rear end muscle mass was about twenty-five percent larger than previously believed. The results were stunning – Dakota could likely have run at forty-five kilometers per hour, faster than many estimates for Tyrannosaurus rex top speed. This finding made perfect evolutionary sense, as hadrosaurs were believed to be T. rex prey.
Anatomical Surprises and Skin Secrets
Among the most exciting discoveries were a fleshy pad on Dakota’s palm, hooves on its feet made of keratin, and well-preserved skin scales that varied in size and shape across the body, tail, arms and legs. The front feet came as a particular surprise to paleontologists – Dakota had what amounted to the reptilian equivalent of a hoof, with its middle fingers connected and covered in a large nail.
Unlike most fossils of dinosaur skin, which just result from scales indenting the sediment around them, Dakota contained actual rust-brown mineralized skin, complete with microscopic cell-like structures between five and thirty microns wide. Although the precise color of the skin remains unknown, the data confirmed previous evidence that the hadrosaur’s skin might have had stripes. Most importantly, Dakota was the first-ever find of a dinosaur where the skin “envelope” had not collapsed onto the skeleton.
Organic Chemistry from the Cretaceous
The presence of both organic compounds and mummified soft tissues in one find is “as rare as hen’s teeth,” according to Manning, and the preservation seen in Dakota was something not seen in any other fossil to date. The team reported discovering organic compounds from the mummy that seemed to be by-products of protein decay.
As research by paleobiologists like Mary Schweitzer has shown, sometimes degraded remnants of original dinosaur organic material can survive the fossilization process under the right conditions, and the authors of Dakota’s description suggested their specimen too contained detailed traces of the dinosaur’s original body. The fact that the skin was mostly intact allowed for the exciting possibility that some of its original chemistry was still present. This opened entirely new avenues for understanding dinosaur biochemistry.
A New Understanding of Mummification
For years, scientists puzzled over how Dakota achieved such exceptional preservation. The breakthrough came from an unexpected source – forensic anthropology. Dakota’s skin showed bite marks indicating the animal’s remains were scavenged by multiple types of carnivores, and the deflated appearance reminded researchers of mummified human and mammalian remains where scavenging creates pathways for liquids and gases to escape, enabling the skin to dry out and become preserved.
Recent research proposed that Dakota was exceptionally preserved because scavenging marks helped the carcass escape the gases, fluids, and microbes that develop during decomposition. As internal viscera were eaten or rotted away, the hadrosaur’s scaly, durable skin was better able to dry out in the sun, forming a wrapper around the bones before burial – this is why Dakota looks “deflated,” with skin shrunk to the bones.
Scientific Impact and Publications
After years of anticipation, the first detailed scientific study of Dakota finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, marking a milestone in dinosaur research. The story of the find, excavation, and analysis was also documented in Manning’s book “Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues and Hard Science,” which detailed how he and Lyson embarked on an extraordinary project using cutting-edge technology to peer millions of years into prehistory.
While the findings weren’t quite as dramatic as studies of preserved Tyrannosaurus and Brachylophosaurus soft-tissue structures carried out by other researchers, Dakota suggested that paleontologists should look more closely at other known “dinosaur mummies” – perhaps they too preserve cells or other minute details that have been ignored, opening up a whole new branch of paleontology in the microbiology lab.
Cultural and Educational Legacy
The National Geographic Channel aired a documentary called “Dino Autopsy” that offered never-before-seen details of what dinosaurs really looked like, as well as clues to how they moved and lived. For younger audiences, the discovery was chronicled in Manning’s book “Dinomummy: The Life, Death, and Discovery of Dakota,” while Lyson went on to earn a PhD in paleontology at Yale University and founded the Marmarth Research Foundation.
From 2014 to the present, Dakota has remained in the care of the North Dakota Heritage Center, where staff have been cleaning the specimen for new exhibits with better lighting and climate conditions to highlight interesting features. The installation includes a 3D model of Dakota’s skin and a tactile component allowing visitors to actually touch a model of the dinosaur’s skin.
Future Research and Ongoing Discoveries
Dakota is already a unique specimen whose remains have altered our understanding of Edmontosaurus and potentially other hadrosaurs as well – there’s certainly a lot more that Dakota can tell us about hadrosaurs, and what we already know is sensational, making it an invaluable contribution to paleontology. As Manning’s colleague Roy Wogelius noted, “This first result with Dakota is just a beginning.”
Specimens like Dakota can rewrite what we think dinosaurs looked like, which is often based on bones alone – among living animals, many important structures like elephant trunks or turkey wattles contain no bones, and dinosaurs undoubtedly had ornaments and body parts that left no trace on the skeleton. The continuing research on Dakota promises to reveal even more secrets about these magnificent creatures that ruled the Earth millions of years ago.
Conclusion
Dakota’s discovery represents far more than just another fossil find – it embodies a perfect storm of teenage curiosity, scientific collaboration, and technological innovation that has fundamentally changed how we understand dinosaurs. From challenging speed calculations to revealing unexpected anatomical features, this remarkable specimen continues to rewrite textbooks and inspire new generations of paleontologists. The partnership between Tyler Lyson and Phillip Manning demonstrates how passion and expertise can combine to unlock secrets that have been hidden for nearly seventy million years.
Perhaps most importantly, Dakota has shown us that there’s still so much we don’t know about the ancient world. Every well-preserved fossil opens new windows into the past, and with advancing technology, we’re constantly finding new ways to extract information from these stone time capsules. Who would have thought that a teenager’s weekend fossil hunt would lead to such groundbreaking discoveries? Makes you wonder what other treasures are still out there, waiting to be found.
