A new paper suggests paleontologists can use chemistry to take dinosaurs' temperature, showing whether they were warm or coldblooded. This 2019 story explains how the method works, and the paleontologists behind it.
movies," she says. The black color signals something just as striking. The fossil isn't just a mineral replica of the original claw. It is likely two-thirds dinosaur residue, Wiemann says."I bet this specimen is maybe 70% organic material by volume—more than we'd think!"
After a proof-of-principle paper last year, Wiemann and Briggs are applying their nondestructive technique—shining a laser on specimens to reveal ancient chemical bonds—to help solve paleontological mysteries. This week at a meeting in Australia, they planned to report how they used protein residue data to help resolve where turtles fit on the vertebrate family tree, and to support the idea that pterosaurs, the largest animals ever to fly, were warm-blooded.
To find out, Wiemann turned to Raman spectroscopy. Many biochemical techniques search for a specific compound, Wiemann says,"but Raman spectroscopy is more exploratory." It uses laser light to identify the types of chemical bonds in a sample. Different bonds absorb different wavelengths, leaving a fingerprint in the spectrum of the reflected light.
The scans don't damage the specimens, so curators agreed to lend them for study. Wiemann's office, down the hall, is littered with specimens from many geologic periods and across the tree of life, each in its carefully labeled box."Curators definitely appreciate that it's nondestructive," she says. In another talk at this week's meeting, Wiemann's and Briggs's colleague Dalton Meyer planned to describe how they compared Raman spectra from bones of many extinct reptiles to find where turtles might belong on the reptile tree—a persistent puzzle. The spectra suggest turtles' ancestors, which lived more than 200 million years ago, were more closely related to dinosaurs than to the ancestors of crocodiles, snakes, and lizards.
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