The Strange Truth About Dinosaurs

The Horizon documentary series on BBC Television continues to be informative and thought provoking.

This week, an extraordinary program threw new light upon every schoolboys fascination, Dinosaurs.

A woman that has been researching dinosaurs, in particular tyrannosaurus rex, for many years has shed new light on this most iconic of all Dinosaurs.

Based in Montana, which is apparently the most likely place in the United States for T Rex to be found, she has been the first person ever to be able to determine the gender of a dinosaur.

And by so doing, also beginning to change everything we thought we knew about these antediluvian creatures.

Since they did not survive beyond a cataclysmic asteroid impact 65 million years ago, it has been impossible to determine much about the structure of these creatures, and in particular because of the lack of any soft tissue surviving in the fossil record, it has been impossible to say how they have been connected if at all connected in evolutionary terms to other creatures.

Certainly the accepted wisdom has been that it was the death of the dinosaurs that enabled mammals to evolve into the most successful creatures that led ultimately to Mankind.

Strangely, however, this Dinosaur specialist has transformed our taxonomic appreciation of the dinosaur. Incredibly, she has been able to retrieve soft tissue from inside the mineralised fossil bones of a T Rex by dissolving the mineralisation content of a small piece of bone in acid.

Inside one particular kind of bone she then discovered a kind of material that can only be found in birds.

Given the fact that we already know that dinosaurs laid eggs in nests, this confirms that they are indeed the oldest ancestor of birds.

It seems that they did also possess hollow bones, just as we are used to conceiving of in birds, and with the potential to analyse soft tissue, although extremely degraded, it has been possible to observe with microscopic assistance, something of the cellular structure of dinosaur blood for the first time, confirming it seems that they were just like birds red blooded.

Analysis of the DNA may be partially possible, from an examination of material that has been preserved within the long bones of these creatures.

But before we get excited about the prospect of eventually making truth of the Hollywood romance, determining the entire dinosaur genome may have been made virtually impossible thanks to the contamination of the best likely specimens by treasure hunters.

It seems that the best specimens might have come from Mongolia, and specifically the Gobi desert.

This has been a desert since the time of the dinosaurs, but since the most complete skeleton of a T Rex was sold at auction some years ago for $7.6 million at Sotheby’s, treasure hunters have been pursuing this best lucrative possible treasure. And thereby making it almost impossible for an undisturbed and uncontaminated discovery to be made.

I was stunned at the implications of this documentary.

As a child, I was as fascinated by dinosaurs as children today, and this confirmation that they seem unlikely to have been birds of a most extraordinary scale is quite remarkable.

Although there has been over the years theories that modern birds are the remaining descendants of dinosaurs, this is the first time that I can recall ever having to consider that they were all birds.

Perhaps unlike what we see today, but it is startlingly terrifying to consider that dinosaur behaviour might have been bird like in terms of flock and group behaviour.