Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues and Hard Science

Paleontologist Phillip Manning has put together a rather detailed book about Dakota, a mummified hadrosaur found by Tyler Lawson, avid fossil hunter, in 1999. There is much for the reader to learn in order to understand the significance of the discovery. And Manning does a good job of providing buckets of background on various dinosaurs, types of fossils, sites, "mummies," types of fossil testing and research, specific finds and what paleontologists learned from them and much more. He is skilled at explaining scientific concepts at a level that the average reader can understand. And his enthusiasm for his work shines through in his writing, peppered with exclamation points and filled with kind words and personal tidbits about his colleagues. The book follows a sometimes meandering path (going off on short, informational tangents) in getting to the meat of the story; specifics about Dakota, from facts on its discoverer, the initial find, to encasement, transport, scan attempts, and research done to learn more about it. Much of it is absolutely fascinating. The recovery of Dakota, an amazingly intact mummy, provided clues to help determine a whole bunch of things about this type of dinosaur, like its skin's texture, its size, what it may have looked like, how it moved, and the orientation of its skeleton (and enabled the creation of the awesome cover sketch). Great stuff aside, I was shocked and disappointed to learn (late in the game) that the book was published without the results of the often alluded to - CT scans of the main body, which were delayed due to difficulties in scanning such a gigantic sample. It was a bit like reading a mystery only to find out, when you get to denouement, that the writer had decided to publish without revealing the most important part! The reader doesn't learn this until page 303, "We are still waiting for the final analysis of the CT data..." Fortunately, there is a bit of info on line at the National Geographic site. Even without the main-body scans, Grave Secrets is a great story for the everyman dinosaur fan. Also good: The Best Science and Nature Writing series, The Best American Science Writing series, and Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.