Buried Treasure

"I tried to look excited," the landowner, Howie Hammond, recalls. "When I got home my daughter asked what it looked like. I said, 'Like a big stain in the rock'."

The first order of business was to bestow a name. Not a scientific name; it was a well-known species, Brachylophosaurus, a Late-Cretaceous duck-billed herbivore that grew as long as 35 feet. But individual specimens are traditionally given cute nicknames by their discoverers. A psychologist might speculate that this is to compensate for human puniness in the face of these terrifying creatures. The spectacular T. rex at the Field Museum in Chicago is known as Sue. (It was discovered by Sue Hendrickson.) The three other almost intact duck-bills Murphy has found are named Elvis, Peanut and Roberta. This one was dubbed Leonardo, after a piece of graffito on a nearby rock: Leonard Webb loves Geneva Jordan 1916.

The following summer Murphy returned to excavate the fossil, carefully blasting off 18 inches of cap rock, removing seven feet of loose sand and rock with a grader before bringing in volunteers to remove the last four feet by hand. As they worked on a forelimb, a volunteer saw something unusual and called to Murphy.

"I took one look and said, 'Oh, my God, this is skin'."

When he realized he was dealing with more than a skeleton, Murphy had to revise his plan; instead of digging out the bones one by one, he had his team dig around the 23-foot-long specimen, so it could be moved to his research lab in one six-ton chunk. He had arranged to borrow an Air Force helicopter to airlift the specimen out of its remote valley, but on the day it was supposed to happen--September 11, 2001--the Air Force had other priorities, so it was carefully winched aboard a flatbed truck. Countless hours of work since then have gone into removing, a grain at a time, the matrix of sedimentary rock in which Leonardo remains half embedded. The process has uncovered the spiny crest along the animal's back and the network of tendons that moved its tail; the fine-grained scales on the back and flanks, and the coarser ones on the lower legs, where tough twigs and shrubs would have brushed it. Two places on the torso where the surface was inadvertently cracked offer a glimpse of what's inside, displaying what Murphy believes are the fossilized remains of intestinal contents. For Karen Chin, an expert on dinosaur coprolites--fossilized dung--at the University of Colorado, this is a potential mother lode of droppings that hadn't hit the ground yet; she's been studying the material in hopes of determining what Leonardo was eating. A paleobotanist has detected 36 different kinds of pollen in the material. Murphy's next goal is to transport Leonardo to Hill Air Force Base in Utah, which has one of the world's largest CT scanners. There the heart, lung, kidneys and other organs, if they are indeed preserved inside, can be visualized and even modeled in three dimensions. He estimates it will cost close to a million dollars. This is less than a Las Vegas casino has already offered to pay to exhibit Leonardo, but Murphy and the Hammonds aren't selling; dinosaur tourism has the potential to be an important part of the economy of this thinly populated region.

A CT scan of an entire dinosaur mummy would be an astonishing achievement, but no more so, perhaps, than what Mary H. Schweitzer, a biologist at North Carolina State University, accomplished with a mere fragment of T. rex bone. This was from a specimen unearthed in 2003 by John R. Horner of the Museum of the Rockies. "He had to break it to get it back to camp," she says. "It was too big to get in the helicopter." Schweitzer put the fossil in a weak acid, which is how biologists study fresh bone; the acid dissolves the mineral matrix, leaving organic tissue behind. If no one had tried it before with a fossil, it was because he had no reason to expect that any organic matter would be left after millions of years. To Schweitzer's amazement, she recovered a flexible substance that resembled collagen, the major organic component of bone, plus evidence of blood vessels and traces of red blood cells. The blood cells, moreover, appear to have nuclei, holding out the possibility of recovering genetic material. Finding even fragments of DNA after 68 million years would be a surprise, but some researchers think it's possible. Leaving aside the unlikely possibility of cloning an entire animal, it would be a potential bonanza to researchers attempting to reconstruct the relationships among dinosaurs, birds and reptiles. "If we're ever going to find dinosaur DNA," she muses, "it will be in samples like this."