As a youth, I was positive I'd grow up to be a paleontologist and discover unheard-of species and immaculately preserved specimens in the Dakota bedrock. Then I discovered girls, so I did what any self-respecting male does: I got into comic books. Shockingly, it didn't really help with ladies.
If I had stuck with my first passion, I might have become like Tyler Lyson, who discovered perhaps the best-preserved dinosaur yet. The mummified hadrosaur belongs to the duck-billed family and showcases detailed scales, skin, muscle, tendons and other soft tissue. Though it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, the discovery is expected to yield new insight into size, body mechanics and physical appearance of dinosaurs in general.
Lyson, who is currently a paleontology grad student at Yale, first spotted the specimen during his high school years while hunting for fossils in the Hell's Creek formation not far from his hometown of Marmarth, ND. In 1999 he thought the few pieces of vertebrae were an unremarkable fossil find, but a return trip in 2004 revealed sections of skin and tissue in the rock. Excavations were completed in 2006, and scientists who've had an early look are already blowing their wad over the find, named "Dakota."
"He looks like a blow-up dinosaur in some parts," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in England who is leading the inquiry. "When you actually look at the detail of the skin, the scales themselves are three dimensional. . . . The arm is breathtaking. It's a three-dimensional arm, you can shake the dinosaur by the hand. It just defies logic that such a remarkable specimen could preserve."
Good for you, Lyson. I'm glad you stuck to your guns, followed your dreams, and made a potentially career-making paleontological discovery for the ages. As for me, I'm alone with hundreds of worthless copies of "She-Hulk" and "Kool-Aid Man" comics, and I've yet to feel the soft caress of a woman. (Sigh) Paleontologists get all the chicks.
Scientists get rare look at dinosaur soft tissue (Washington Post)
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