A powerful scanning machine normally used for structural analysis of giant rocket parts and airplane engines may tell Field Museum scientists whether Sue, the museum’s gargantuan Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur, was a warm-blooded or cold-blooded animal.
Thursday afternoon, Field paleontologists carefully prepared Sue’s 6-foot-long skull for shipment Friday by truck to an industrial laboratory owned by Boeing Corp. near Los Angeles.
It will remain at the facility for about a month while technicians put it through an industrial CT (computer tomography) scan machine. They will take 800 to 1,600 cross-section images of the skull, much of it still encased in 1,800 pounds of rock that preserved it for 67 million years after its death. It was discovered in South Dakota in 1990 and purchased last year by the Field for $8.4 million.
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“Boeing has one of the few scanners in the country large enough and powerful enough to scan Sue’s skull,” said Christopher Brochu, a post-doctoral researcher who is heading Field’s team of scientists recovering Sue’s bones from the South Dakota rock in which the skeleton was found.
“It is a much more powerful machine than a medical scanner. It would kill a living animal or human being.
“But the (fossilized) skull essentially is a very dense rock object, hard bone surrounded by rock, so we have to go to an industrial scanner to get enough penetration.” It will be the first time scientists have used modern scanning technology to look at a T. rex skull, he said. Without causing physical damage, the scanner will photographically “slice” the skull into hundreds of cross sections, each slice just a fraction of an inch thick.
Scientists hope that such a detailed look will show some tiny anatomical features never detected before in T. rex skulls. Those include nerve and blood pathways and air-filled passages around the braincase.
That would be invaluable in comparing tyrannosaurs with other dinosaur species, said Brochu, and even with living animals, especially birds, considered to be modern-day dinosaur descendants.
In particular, Brochu said, he will be looking for very thin, delicate bone structures in Sue’s nasal cavity.
Only warm-blooded animals have that nasal structure, used to help radiate heat as they breathe, he said.
Nobody knows if dinosaurs were warm or cold-blooded.
“If we see those bones in Sue, we’ll know definitely that T. rexes were warm-blooded,” Brochu said, “but if we don’t find them, it won’t tell us anything one way or the other.”
The museum is working to restore Sue’s entire skeleton by 2000.