Dinosaur's Secrets May be Right Under Nose
A duck-billed dinosaur that fell dead in a swamp 75 million years ago is
finally getting a trip to the doctor.
Scientists hope a peek inside its sandstone-filled nasal passages, courtesy of
a St. Joseph Medical Center CT scan, may provide clues in the scientific debate
over whether dinosaurs were warmblooded or coldblooded.
The St. Joseph technicians and paleontologists will rely on equipment used to
make three-dimensional X-rays of humans to take a look inside the fossilized
Parasaurolophus skull found in northwestern New Mexico last summer.
They will be looking, among other things, for characteristic bones that would
signal whether the creature was warmblooded, said Tom Williamson, a
paleontologist at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and a co-discoverer
of the skull.
St. Joseph volunteered its services to the scientists, said spokeswoman Brigid
O'Reilly. By recording a series of closely spaced cross-sections of the skull,
the CT scan will permit scientists to do a precise computer reconstruction of
it, O'Reilly said. The scan shows differences in density, so
it will clearly map out the fossilized bone and the sandstone that fills and
encases it, Williamson said. Williamson and State Museum of Pennsylvania
paleontologist Robert Sullivan unearthed the skull last August near Farmington.
The two will be working with Glenn Daleo, a CT scan specialist at San Diego
Children's Hospital who has worked with paleontologists on manipulating data 
from CT scans of dinosaur skulls.
They will be trying to understand the internal structure of a great horn-like
structure that rises from the top of the Parasaurolophus' skull.
"We want to know what the inside structure is like," Williamson said.
By looking in the nasal passages, Williamson and Sullivan will be entering
the debate about whether dinosaurs were warmblooded creatures, like modern
mammals, or coldblooded, like reptiles. They will be looking for features
called "respiratory turbinate bones," Williamson said. The twisting, curving
turbinate bones, found in humans and other warmblooded creatures, serve to
cool exhaled air, helping reclaim some of the water that otherwise would be
lost when warm, moist air is exhaled from the lungs.
Without the small turbinate bones, moisture loss "would probably have posed
a chronic obstacle" to warmblooded creatures, according to John Ruben of Oregon
State University. Their absence would be evidence the creatures were
coldblooded. The debate over turbinates in dinosaurs was joined in earnest
in November at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology scientific
conference in Pittsburgh. Ruben presented a paper arguing turbinates were
absent in a wide range of dinosaur fossils, suggesting the long-extinct animals
were coldblooded. Jack Horner, a paleontologist at Montana State University,
delivered a paper saying he had found turbinate structures in a skull he had
CT scanned, suggesting the animal was warmblooded.  Williamson said the
Parasaurolophus skull, because it is in excellent condition, offers the
potential to add important new data to the debate, one way or the other.
"This is really solid bone," he said, tapping the skull on his museum workbench.
"A lot of the stuff we get is really crumbly."
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