X-Rays May Help Crack Dinosaur Egg’s Secrets
Call it “Star Wars” meets “Jurassic Park.” Scientists using X-ray scanners hope to crack open one of nature’s most closely guarded secrets: life inside a dinosaur egg.
“It’s something that we don’t get a chance to see very often,” said Steve Azevedo, an electrical engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Until now, Azevedo’s contact with dinosaurs has been limited to “what I’ve watched on PBS and what my kids tell me.” But he and colleagues at the nuclear weapons lab have been called in to try to peek inside the kidney-shaped dinosaur egg, which contains an embryo, without breaking the fossilized shell.
That’s where the X-ray scanner--an instrument first developed for the now-defunct “Star Wars” program--comes in.
News of the project drew interest in paleontology circles.
“This is sort of the beginning, or you might say, the hatching of a new aspect of dinosaur studies,” said Michael Brett-Surman, a dinosaur expert at the Smithsonian Institution. “The technology is there where we can first look at the egg without having to essentially destroy it to get at the bones.”
The egg, which is about six inches long, is one of only about 100 known to contain a dinosaur embryo, Azevedo said.
It looks more like a chunk of rock than a key to the past. One end has been broken off, revealing a cocoa-colored inside with a narrow band of white at the bottom, believed to be what is left of the embryo, crushed by the weight of ages.
A few pieces of blackened crust represent what’s left of the shell.
The egg arrived at Livermore from University of Notre Dame researchers last month. Lab scientists are working with Notre Dame paleontologist J. Keith Rigby Jr., the Beijing Museum of Natural History and the China University of Geosciences.
Azevedo hopes the scanner’s high-resolution image will allow scientists to identify specific bones and possibly indicate what kind of dinosaur the embryo would have been.
The scanner is essentially a small room with a turntable on which objects are mounted and bombarded with X-rays. Two-dimensional images are made from multiple angles and then combined to make a 3-D image that is fed into computers.
The scanners have been used to look at dense objects, such as missile casings, and more recently to study nuclear waste drums to determine what’s inside without the risk of opening them.
So far, little is known about the egg. It was found in China with several others, but no adult bones were found close by to give a clue about the species. The egg is believed to be about 65 million years old, meaning it was laid about the time that dinosaurs were becoming extinct.
Now, scientists wait to see whether their futuristic tools can give new glimpses of the past.
“It’s not the first time (an egg) has been found, but it is interesting,” said Paul Sereno, an associate professor at the University of Chicago. “You learn things about dinosaur growth, dinosaur size at birth.”
One of the most fascinating things that was found in previous research was that embryos of the duck-billed dinosaur were actually chewing inside the egg with their teeth, he said.
