Periodic Tables: EVENT CANCELLED

In 2000, a dinosaur was found buried under tons of rock in the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation (63 million years ago). It was recovered in the most complicated excavation ever undertaken by that museum, or by the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. Our analyses of this spectacular specimen transformed our expectations of what we might still learn from fossils, perhaps even changing our understanding of how fossils are formed. This fossil actually retained remnants of the dinosaur’s original tissues and molecules and for the first time, we were able to determine its gender!

This is the story of these investigations, and of how much more we still have to learn.

Mary Schweitzer is a full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University and holds a joint appointment at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences. Click here for the flyer.