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By Lori Phillips, Digital Content Coordinator
When you're six years old and your mom works at The Children's Museum, it's not out of the ordinary to learn over the dinner table that a dinosaur is coming to "your" museum. My son, Teddy, usually plays it pretty cool when I share (what I believe to be) awesome news about the museum, but he couldn't contain his amazement when I mentioned a "mummy dinosaur"...now that's cool.
It was November, and the museum had just announced that Leonardo the mummified dinosaur would be unveiled in Dinosphere in March. As I excitedly showed Teddy the photos of Leonardo, his first question was, "But mom, where's the toilet paper?" When I gave him a puzzled look he said, "Like, when something is a mummy it's wrapped in toilet paper, right?" Of course! It was really the perfect question. And thankfully I knew the perfect person to answer it—paleontologist and natural science curator, Dallas Evans.
Please tell Teddy that we're working on that. When Leonardo was excavated, it was wrapped in aluminum foil to keep it safe. (Which probably made it look like a gigantic baked potato.) The aluminum foil is just a separator—it keeps the plaster from sticking to the fossil. But the foil isn't good for long term storage because it will oxidize & discolor. So we removed the foil and replaced it with acid free tissue paper while it was in storage. Essentially, until it's ready to be put on display, it will look like a mummy wrapped in toilet paper.
But that was in November, and now Leonardo is on display. (No more acid free tissue paper!) So...if Leonardo is a mummy, where are his wrappings?
Mummies are any dead bodies with preserved skin, muscle, and other soft tissue. Leonardo isn't a human mummy, like you usually would envision. Leonardo isn't a wrapped dinosaur, either. Leonardo is a natural mummy. Nature mummified Leonardo, so he doesn't have wrappings. It's estimated that 90 percent of Leonardo's body is still covered in fossilized soft tissue. When dinosaurs died, their carcasses were usually exposed to weather, scavengers, insects, and bacteria, but sometimes they would be naturally buried in sediment by things like sandstorms, mudslides, high tides or sinkholes and that sediment would harden into rock over time.
If conditions were just right, mineral-heavy water would seep into the rock, and into the hollow spaces in the bones, and the bone materials would be replaced with rock-like minerals. And, if the chemicals and the moisture level and the pressure and other factors were perfect, over time, the bone would be replaced by a rock-like copy or natural cast called (drum roll, please)...a fossil! Leonardo died on the banks of a shallow river in what is now Montana. His body was eventually buried and minerals in the river infiltrated the dinosaur's soft tissues, desiccating and preserving them, resulting in natural mummification. This created a mummified, fossilized dinosaur—the rarest of the rare!
Learn more about Leonardo's story in the blog post, "Here Comes the Dino Mummy!" by Dinosphere Coordinator Mookie Harris. And be sure to meet Leonardo in his new home in Dinosphere!
