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Salt Lake Tribune Menlo Park, Calif. » Scientists at Stanford University are studying scans obtained by new X-ray technology that may give them a picture of a dinosaur bird that lived 150 million years ago. The fossil of a 16-inch-long archaeopteryx (ar-kee-OP-ter-iks) -- or "ancient wing" in Greek -- is from the late Jurassic period. Scans show that it wasn't a sight you would welcome, with sharp teeth on its beak and talons at the end of each wing. {mosgoogle left 7887083644} "It's kind of like a bird stuffed up a dinosaur's butt," says University of Manchester paleontologist Phil Manning, one of the researchers. Scientists at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy, have subjected the fossil to powerful X-rays produced by electrons moving at or near the speed of light. The researchers used synchrotron radiation, which produces intense X-ray beams, to build an elemental image of the creature. The X-ray beam creates a unique pattern that reveals the chemical composition of the remnants of the animal that are still preserved in the stone. A waterfall of data on the chemicals in the bird, plus those that flowed in during fossilization, is fed into a computer program. Scientists are able to create an image of the traces of such elements as calcium, phosphorous, sulfur, zinc and copper. Seen singly or layered over each other, they give an image of the "ghost" of a body that disintegrated millions of years ago. The original idea of using this X-ray technology on fossils came from engineer Robert Morton, an oil company chemist. He realized that the technology used to search for oil in rocks could be used to "see" the chemical ghosts of fossils. When this particular creature died, it sank to the bottom of a shallow lagoon, where it was entombed in the limestone. The archaeopteryx is important because it's a crossover species, an example of evolution in motion as one branch of dinosaurs was morphing into what would become the ancestors of birds. But only 10 archaeopteryx fossils have been found, and of those only five are relatively intact. Scientists will be working on the data for months, hoping to release their findings on the fossil in late 2009 or early 2010.
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