Edmontosaurus mummy in the Senckenberg Nature Museum

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The Senckenberg mummy

The Edmontosaurus -Mumie the Senckenberg Natural History is a dinosaur - fossil , which in 1910 Wyoming ( United States was discovered) and in today Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt is issued. The fossil is attributed to the species Edmontosaurus annectens , a representative of the Hadrosauridae ("duck-billed dinosaur"). It comprises a complete skeleton that was found wrapped in skin prints - this rare preservation type is known as the “dinosaur mummy”. The Senckenberg mummy is one of the four best-preserved Hadrosaurid mummies, and is the second to be discovered. The find was made by the Sternberg family, a famous family of fossil hunters who sold their numerous finds to various museums in North America and Europe. Only two years earlier, the Sternbergs had recovered the Trachodon mummy , another Edmontosaurus annectens mummy, in the same find region, which is now on display in the American Museum of Natural History in New York .

Discovery story

The mummy was discovered and recovered in the summer of 1910 by the Sternberg family in the layers of the Lance Formation in Converse County (now Niobrara County ). The Sternbergs - Charles Hazelius Sternberg and his three sons Charles Mortam , George and Levi , had worked in the area since 1908. In 1908 and 1909 the family discovered the famous Trachodon mummy and two skulls of the horned dinosaur Triceratops ; one skull she sold to the British Museum of Natural History in London, while the other was acquired by the American Museum of Natural History.

The Senckenberg mummy comes from the southern Schneider Creek area. Charles Mortam discovered pieces of a tail scenting out of the sandstone while roaming the area in search of fossils. The subsequent removal of the sandstone resting on the fossil revealed a complete skeleton with skin impressions. As Charles Hazelius reports, the skeleton measured a length of 5.25 meters when it was found, with 1.2 meters on the skull, 2.4 meters on the trunk and 1.65 meters on the tail. The recovery of the fossil was the most laborious that the family had undertaken until then. Charles Hazelius was determined to secure every fragment of the skin prints, which is why the blocks packed for shipping were particularly large. The block containing the body of the mummy weighed about 1.6 tons; the entire fossil weighed 4.5 tons. Since the Sternbergs did not have a pulley system , the block was raised gradually by lifting it slightly using poplar levers and then shoveling sand under it. After the block was raised in this manner to a height of four feet, it was loaded onto the cart for transport to the Edgemont , South Dakota railroad station 120 kilometers away . The recovery and transport took two and a half months of work.

Charles Hazelius offered the fossil to Fritz Drevermann , paleontologist and director of the Senckenberg Museum, for sale. Drevermann was able to raise the requested sum thanks to a donation from the industrialist Arthur von Weinberg . Shortly after Drevermann's acceptance, Sternberg received an offer from the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa . The museum offered double the sum of money for the fossil including assembly that Sternberg was to receive from the Senckenberg Museum for the fossil without assembly. Sternberg wrote in 1917: “ I shall never forget the effort I made to induce him to give up the specimen, or take another in its stead. [...] But it crossed the Atlantic. The last message I had of it, before this awful war cut off all communications, was that the head had been prepared and it was the best of which there was any record. ”(German:“ I will never forget the efforts I made to get him to give up the copy or to take another instead. […] But it crossed the Atlantic. The last message I got before this one The terrible war that interrupted all communications was that the head had been dissected and it was the best known specimen ”) In the summer of 1910, the Sternbergs also discovered four Triceratops skulls, two of which also went to the Senckenberg Museum.

description

As with the trachodon mummy of the American Museum, the bones are in their original anatomical compound and are preserved three-dimensionally, not flattened as in many other fossils. The skeleton of the Senckenberg mummy has survived almost completely, while the tail, the hind feet and part of the pelvis are missing in the Trachodon mummy. Skin impressions have been obtained from the right side of the trunk and neck and from both forearms. There are particularly well-preserved prints on the hands, these prints show 3 to 5 millimeter scales. During the dissection, most of the skin impressions were separated from the mummy.

Taphonomy

The Trachodon mummy discovered in the same area is commonly interpreted as the fossil of a natural dehydrated mummy. This is indicated by the remnants of the skin that are tightly adhering to the bones and partially drawn into the body cavity. The Sternbergs found differences between the Trachodon and Senckenberg mummies: In the latter, the skin would not adhere closely to the bones, but rather trace the original body outline. In addition, the Senckenberg mummy was not discovered in the supine position like the Trachodon mummy, but in an upright position in the sediment, with the tip of the snout pointing upwards and legs pressed against the body. Based on these observations, the Sternbergs suspect that the animal sank and suffocated in soft sediment, possibly quicksand . Today's palaeontologists state that there is no evidence for this interpretation.

Employees of the Senckenberg Museum write that, like the Trachodon mummy, it is probably the fossil of a natural dry mummy. This would indicate the cramped-looking posture with the neck curved backwards.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Phillip Lars Manning: Grave secrets of dinosaurs: soft tissues and hard science . National Geographic, Washington, DC 2008, Chapter four: Dinosaur Mummies.
  2. ^ Nate L. Murphy, David Trexler, Mark Thompson, "Leonardo," a mummified Brachylophosaurus from the Judith River Formation . In: Kenneth Carpenter (Ed.): Horns and Beaks: Ceratopsian and Ornithopod Dinosaurs . Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 2006, ISBN 0-253-34817-X , pp. 128 .
  3. ^ A b c d e Charles H. Sternberg: Hunting dinosaurs in the bad lands of the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada: a sequel to The life of a fossil hunter . The world company press, Lawrence, Kansas 1917, p. 4-8 .
  4. ↑ a b c Katherine Rogers: The Sternberg Fossil Hunters: A Dinosaur Dynasty . Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1999, ISBN 0-87842-404-0 , pp. 118-121 .
  5. ^ Richard Swann Lull, Nelda E. Wright: Hadrosaurian Dinosaurs of North America . In: Geological Society of America Special Papers . No. 40 , 1942, pp. 23 .
  6. ↑ a b c d Bernd Herkner: Frankfurt's Dinosaur Mummy . In: Alfried Wieczorek, Wilfried Rosendahl (eds.): Mummies of the world . Prestel, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-7913-5030-1 , pp. 279-280 .
  7. ^ A b Henry Fairfield Osborn: Integument of the iguanodont dinosaur Trachodon . In: Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History . tape 1 , 1912, p. 33-35 .
  8. ^ Charles M. Sternberg: Comments on Dinosaurian Preservation in the Cretaceous of Alberta and Wyoming . In: Publications in Palaeontology . No. 4 . Ottawa 1970, pp. 4 .
  9. ↑ Edmontosaurus . In: Senckenberg. Retrieved April 4, 2013 .