John Updike got us talking about National Geographic and dinosaurs last week, and now Yale paleontology grad student Tyler Lyson continues the thread. Lyson’s discovery of a 65 million year old mummified hadrosaur on his uncle’s North Dakota ranch seven years ago is the subject of an upcoming NatGeo documentary and a new book for young readers called Dinomummy, for which Lyson has written a foreword (the book is by Dr. Phil Manning, the scientist Lyson contacted about his find).
“When I was a young aspiring paleontologist who spent every summer day out in the badlands in search of fossils, I never thought I would find such a remarkable dinosaur,” Lyson recalls. “Dakota holds the clues to scientific questions that I have always been interested in: what did dinosaurs actually look like when alive, which could provide insights into their behavior, and also how are dinosaur mummies preserved.”