#fossil-preservation

#fossil-preservation

The metabolic rate of an organism is the sum of the energy necessary to acquire, convert and allocate energy to growth, reproduction and maintenance, which sets energetic limits on biological activities and establishes the pace and pattern of life. The temperature- and mass-dependence of metabolic rate, from the smallest unicellular organisms to the largest plants and animals9, enables one to reconstruct the metabolic rates of extinct organisms and retrodict fundamental large-scale features of their palaeoenvironments11.

You might not think a paleontologist looking for 66-million-year-old fossils would need to ask a rancher about his great-grandmother's job in the Wyoming badlands. But that's what Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, did when he was trying to track down a historic site where a famous dinosaur mummy was found in 1908. Sereno's work, published in the journal Science, brings new clarity about the appearance of the duck-billed Edmontosaurus annectens, a massive herbivore from the Cretaceous period.