Scientists examining a femur of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex found that the T-Rex was a mother to be. This is a big find since scientists have trouble determining the sex of these dinosaurs whose bones they find. The bone in question can give us some insight into the egg-laying evolutionary process.
The team from North Carolina State University published its findings in an academic journal last week with the bones that were found in Montana. The tissue, medullary bone, is usually found in dinosaurs that are about to or have just finished laying eggs.
The tissue could also have been from a T-Rex that was suffering from a disease. They did a chemical analysis of the bones just to make sure. They used a sample of ostrich bones to determine that the dinosaur did have medullary bone tissue similar to modern egg-laying animals. It keeps the pregnant dinosaur from having to drain calcium from her bones for the eggs.
Even being able to distinguish between the sexes of dinosaur remains would open up new possibilities. That will be difficult considering the medullary bone tissue can only be found right after the mother T-Rex has laid eggs. This particular T-Rex was 16 – 20 years old when she died.
These findings could lead to a way to determine the sex of individual dinosaurs that we have found and are going to find. It could also lead to cloning of dinosaurs. Sounds good in theory, but we have a whole trilogy of movies saying that this would be a bad idea!
We don’t have the technology to clone dinosaurs quite yet, but scientists hope that these fossils could unlock dinosaur DNA. These findings could lead to many new discoveries into our planets history and the evolution of our ancestors.
Featured image by Julian Fong via flickr.com, available under Creative Commons 2.0 license.
