Scientists have used high-power
X-rays to "see inside" an exquisite and complete dinosaur specimen.
The skeleton belongs to a small,
plant-eating dinosaur which lived 200 million years ago - at the beginning of
the Jurassic Period.
Although this species was
widespread at the time, scientists have largely had to rely on incomplete
fossils.
The analysis was carried out at
the ESRF facility in Grenoble, France, and showed that the specimen was
juvenile.
The skeleton is too small and
fragile, and the rocks around it too hard, to allow it to be studied by
conventional means.
In addition, the rock matrix in
which the fossil is preserved contains trapped minerals which prevented it from
being scanned in a standard CT scanner.
The specimen was discovered in a
stream bed on a farm in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa by
palaeontologist Billy de Klerk.
"There's still a lot we
don't know about early plant-eating dinosaurs," said Prof Jonah Choiniere
from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
"We need new specimens like
this one and new technology like the synchrotron to fill in those gaps."
Prof Choiniere, along with Dr
Vincent Fernandez, from the ESRF (European Synchrotron), scanned the specimen
with high-powered X-rays to understand how the species, Heterodontosaurus
tucki, ate, moved, and breathed.
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