Blue Collar Scientist

Zach Miller at When Pigs Fly Returns has an outstanding post called An Edmontosaurus named Dakota. Dakota is a fossil dinosaur mummy that is getting news coverage yesterday and today for no immediately apparent reason.

Leveraging the power of TIVO, I watched a National Geographic Channel show on this dinosaur a couple weeks ago. It was promoted with high-hype breathlessness as a major discovery that had completely overturned our knowledge about dinosaurs - or at least hadrosaurs - and I got sucked in. Unfortunately, the actual show disappointed me.

From memory, there were only two things the program asserted had been learned from Dakota:

• Dakota had differently-sized scales in patterns that are similar to the way differently-sized scales in lizards indicate differently colored areas of skin.
• Dakota’s tail vertebrae were not fused nor in contact with one another, but were separated from each other by about 10% of their length (so my memory of the graphic would suggest, at least).

The documentarians showed a reconstruction of a hadrosaur with the tail vertebrae in contact with one another, and this mount was seized upon by Daktoa’s principle investigator, Phillip Manning, to make a dramatic - dare I say histrionic? - statement on-camera along the lines of, “we thought we had this all figured out, but we were WRONG!”

Well, first off, of course we were wrong. Ignorance has a way of doing that. Until you find an articulated fossilized hadrosaur skeleton, you’re likely going to make a few mistakes putting such things back together. Second, if you spend any amount of time at all working in science, you are going to find out that you are wrong all the time, and that this is neither very dramatic nor very significant. But finally, and more fundamentally, I’m virtually certain I’ve seen hadrosaur mounts that have the tail vertebrae separated by an inch or two. It made me suspect that a straw man was being cooked up by the documentarians. Are we to understand that one incorrectly-done mount signifies a serious and drastic error throughout the whole of dinosaur paleontology? Or is my recollection false, and it really was is thought that hadrosaur tail vertebrae were in contact in life?

Or maybe the mount that was shown was one that Manning had put together himself and he was shocked at having made such an error? I’m really not sure. Anyway, Manning came off as smarmy - and in another part of the documentary, as unprepared and a little less than competent.

Manning and his team took the mummy to Boeing, where they have a giant CAT scanner. The idea was to fit the mummy on the scanner, scan it, and see what was inside. The program gave the impression that the process was largely a debacle. The largest piece of the mummy (which is apparently in at least two pieces) could barely be lifted by the lifting equipment. Once that problem was solved the piece couldn’t be fit on the scanner. I think this was solved by knocking off some excess matrix. (Did anyone think about using a tape measure before hauling the fossil all the way out there? The documentary didn’t say.) When they finally got the specimen on the scanner, with inches of clearance at most, they couldn’t see anything inside. There was too much matrix, I guess, or maybe the fossil itself was too extincting of the X-rays. In any case, they got some images that were perfect specimens of noisy astronomical CCD images with no signal - dark frames, in the parlance.

Couldn’t an assay of extinction at the energies of the CAT scanner have been done prior to hauling the mummy halfway across the country? I would have thought yes, that doing this would have been easier than moving the fossil, but what do I know.

And why didn’t they just try for a CAT scan after the matrix had been removed? My vague understanding was that they wanted to use the CAT scan results to guide the removal of matrix, but that impression might be a result of a desperate mental need to find sense and meaning in the inexplicable spectacle that I was seeing. I’m not suggesting that Manning’s team was incompetent in fact; but the documentary made it look that way, by playing up setbacks as dramatic moments without also discussing the kinds of preparation that the team undertook and the reason the risks were being taken.

So much for the big piece of the mummy. A smaller piece was scanned as well, and lo, there were the aforementioned tail vertebrae. And that was about that. The mummy was sent to another location and preparators worked on taking off the matrix. I walked away from that documentary thinking that they had a potentially nice specimen, but that watching an hour of TV about it had been a pretty pointless thing to do.

Now Zach weighs in on his blog:

This fossil has been known since 1999, its genus was just released today, and its species is still unconfirmed.

Whoah. Nine years just to identify the genus. I hadn’t been aware of that. The documentary kind of glossed over the fact that they didn’t really know what dinosaur they had on their hands.

…it’s curious that not a single peer-reviewed publication exists about Dakota, yet two books have been penned (one of them a kid’s book, one an awful popular science book). The National Geographic channel has aired two specials about Dakota, too. Dakota needs to be studied and published.

I hadn’t been aware that nothing scientific had been published. Again, the documentary kinda glossed that over. This is insane, to be fast approaching the decade anniversary of the fossil’s discovery, and still have nothing in the scientific literature about it at all. It is true that a thorough study of a good dinosaur mummy will probably take twenty years or more, but you need to start somewhere. Twenty years are half up and the PI has no results.

Zach rightly points out that Manning, or his funding sources, appear to be trying to do science by press release with this mummy. Someone, like his scientific peers perhaps, needs to give Manning a kick in the pants to actually publish something. If an astronomer had sat around on similarly significant discovery for ten years without publishing anything, their institution or funding sources would probably have kicked them off the job and found a new PI for the project by now.