Ancient eggs gave dinosaur enthusiast Dr. Neal Naranjo a surprise when he had a CT scan done to view their contents. “I had these eggs, and I was always curious and wondering if something was inside,” said Naranjo, owner of A Pineywoods Home Health.
Naranjo contacted the Diagnostic Center at Woodland Heights Medical Center and brought six eggs in for CT scans, which produced a three-dimensional cross-section of each egg. To his surprise, five of the six eggs brought in for scans had embryos inside.
Naranjo believes the first egg scanned belonged to a Pterodactyl, a well-known winged reptile that lived from the late Triassic period to the Cretaceous period. Pterodactyl eggs, he said, are rare because they were pliable, unlike those of other creatures. The scan of the egg revealed a preserved Pterodactyl embryo, the only known in-egg Pterodactyl embryo in the world.
“When we saw it, we started yelling and screaming and jumping up and down and going ‘It’s a baby! It’s a baby!’” Naranjo said.
Since posting the CT scans of the egg and embryo on Facebook, Naranjo has received phone calls from paleontologists all over the U.S. and Europe. In January, he will to take the egg to the Tuscon Mineral and Fossil Show to have paleontologists from Europe, Russia, China and the U.S. give their opinions of the egg and the embryo inside. Also in 2011, he plans to present the egg and CT scans at the paleontology scientific conference.
“I’m still excited,” Naranjo said with a grin as he showed sheet after sheet of the egg’s CT results. The only other Pterodactyl embryo he had seen, he said, came from an egg that had been cracked in half.
Inside another egg, which Naranjo said belonged to a Segnosaur, a tiny skull, spine and three-toed foot were easily visible in the scan. Segnosaurs, also called Therizinosaurs, are believed to have stood 13-feet tall and were equipped with three-toed front limbs that ended in nine-inch claws, according to a Discovery Channel web slideshow dedicated to the creature.
“To be able to see this much detail and to be able to get that kind of clarity is great,” Naranjo said.
Though Naranjo said that he found the Segnosaur egg, most of the other eggs in his collection were purchased.
“To find an egg is a once in a lifetime experience,” Naranjo said.
The excitement during the scans was contagious, with staff members just as interested in the results as Naranjo and his crew.
“We were all excited,” said Rebecca Petty, radiology director at the Diagnostic Center. “For us to get to help in something like this was amazing.”
Now that the CT scan was successfully performed on the eggs, Naranjo said, he can share the parameters needed to scan the eggs with the scientific community.
In addition to the eggs, Naranjo brought in fossils from a hadrosaur he found in Montana. The dinosaur had been bitten in the leg during its lifetime, and Naranjo was curious to see what they could learn from the bite wound. The CT scan revealed that the dinosaur had suffered from an infection that went all the way to the bone marrow. Despite the infection, the dinosaur survived, Naranjo said.
Another fossil from the hadrosaur showed small hooves on each of the herbivore’s toes.
“When we were finding the hadrosaur and discovered hooves, it was the first time to ever find hooves and we were 14 miles from the closest human being,” Naranjo said.
This is not the first time a CT scan has been used to identify the contents of dinosaur eggs. At Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Fla., surgeon Martin Shugar recently obtained hospital permission to scan a dinosaur egg to promote an exhibit at the Graves Museum of Archaeology and Natural History, according to an article on nationalgeographic.com.
“This first test revealed small amounts of embryonic material,” Shugar said in the article.
All of the eggs will be on display at the Naranjo Natural History Museum in Lufkin, which should break ground in the near future. Once the museum is completed, Naranjo said, the museum will showcase some 2,000 pieces that span the ages, from pieces of Earth’s crust to fossils of ancient creatures. Some of the pieces were found by Naranjo; others have been purchased and collected from around the globe.
Naranjo expects the museum’s spotlight to be “Mary Anne,” a 30-foot-long hadrosaur found by Naranjo in Montana. Mary Anne is a very special specimen for several reasons — her skin and tendons were mummified along with her bones, and she is the first hadrosaur ever discovered to have hooves. Those attributes have earned the dinosaur a lot of attention from the scientific community.
In addition to Mary Anne, the museum will house a dimetrodon, a dinosaur famous for the sail-like spines along its back, a triceratops and a fleshed-out velociraptor made in Germany in connection with the movie “Jurassic Park.” Naranjo purchased the raptor from Tuscan.
ReCently, Naranjo and the Diagnostic Center’s team have found embryos in five of the six different dinosaur eggs that he will have on display at the Naranjo Natural History Museum in Lufkin. All of the eggs are believed to be from the Cretaceous period some 145 million to 65 million years ago.
Author: Larissa Graham | Source: The Lufkin Daily News [December 27, 2010]
