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CCTV News: Through dinosaur fossils, what information can scientists decode from them? Next, explore the Dinosaur Lab and learn the secrets of the fossils.
To know the secrets hidden deep in fossils, we must first make a tool that leads to the microscopic world - hard tissue slices. Here, a fossil is buried, cut, polished, and finally sliced to a few tens of microns, about the diameter of a human hair.
Because fossils are precious, slices are often only a few millimeters in size, but under the microscope, they can open up another world for scientists. Here, the bone composition has disappeared, but the bone tissue structure left behind can still read a lot of information.
Zhao Qi, associate researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences: This is a photo under normal light, and you can see that there are some (lines), like the annual rings of trees. These reptiles have a cyclical growth, and when they grow particularly slowly, they form such a line, and by counting the number of this line, we can accurately calculate its age, for example, here we are sure that it is 3 years old.
In addition to age, through the study of bone tissue such as vascular passages, combined with some data comparisons from living animals, scientists can also infer the metabolic rate of dinosaurs.
Zhao Qi, associate researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences: For example, if we judge whether dinosaurs are warm-blooded or cold-blooded, then the best evidence comes from our bone histology.
Reporter: So is it warm-blooded or cold-blooded?
Zhao Qi, associate researcher of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: We now think that it should not be as warm as our current humans, but it is also completely higher than the metabolic rate of some traditional reptiles, so in a broader sense we can think of it as a warm-blooded animal.
The exploration of the microscopic organization structure of fossils has greatly expanded the thinking of dinosaur research. How powerful were dinosaurs? How far and how high could dinosaurs fly? It is believed that the continuous deepening of scientists' research on bone tissue will help people solve these mysteries in dinosaurs faster.