Just like he is every year, Dr. Steve Stevenson, chief
geneticist of Animal Adventures Institute (AAI), a division of Animal
Adventures Inc. is at it again! Over the past several months since Dr.
Samuel Adamson brought back dinosaur fossils from his latest fossil excavation,
Dr. Steve and his assistant Oliver Oviraptor have been hard at work
cloning a pair of new dinosaurs. The two new dinosaurs that were released from
the institute this year are Edmontosaurus annectens and Nanshiungosaurus
brevispinus. Edmontosaurus, I've heard of, but I'm unable to say the
same about Nanshiungosaurus.
After struggling and failing to pronounce
Nan-she-ung-oh-soar-us, I found out my trusty, junior photographer, Daniel P.
Smithwater, was feeling a bit sick (there's this nasty bug going around Animal
Adventures Inc.), so Lizzy the Lizard came along with me as my photographer
to interview Dr. Steve Stevenson at this laboratory. “I'm really excited to
have finally cloned the Edmontosaurus,” Dr. Steve says, “I mean, I've
literally been trying for years – Years! – to clone this beast. The problem was
that even though over the years, Dr. Sam has been finding several Edmontosaurus
skeletons (they're very common in the Hell Creek Formation), he never found any
with enough Edmontosaurus DNA to use in cloning.”
For those of you who don't know, Edmontosaurus is a
large herbivorous hadrosaur – duckbilled dinosaur – from western North America.
The Edmontosaurus Dr. Steve cloned has been named Edward (“Eddy” for
short) and is 30 feet long, 3 tons in weight and stands 17 feet tall on two
legs. He has a broad duck-like bill for eating a wide variety of plants.
Paleontologists believe Edmontosaurus lived in large herds of consisting
of adults and their young. Fossils reveal that Edmontosaurus was a
favorite food of Tyrannosaurus rex.
Oliver is quoted for saying, “The other dinosaur we cloned
was a Nanshiungosaurus. It was a therizinosaur from China. We didn't
have any Nanshiungosaurus fossils in our collection; instead, we
retrieved its DNA from a mosquito embedded in amber we have in the fossil and
amber storage room...[we] grabbed a random piece of amber and extracted the DNA
from the mosquito inside. We were really excited to see what species we would
clone.”
Nanshiungosaurus (named Ning) was 15 feet long and
weighed 1,323 pounds. Other than the long neck and pot-belly, Nanshiungosaurus'
most striking feature is no doubt the long claws on the hand, used for defense
and obtaining tree leaves to eat. Therizinosaurs have been somewhat of a
mystery to paleontologists, as it wasn't until recently that we've had
skeletons of these animals to study. Before skeletons were discovered,
scientists had only fossils of the claws and thought therizinosaurs were
ferocious predators. Now we know otherwise.
“I am very excited that we were able to bring these amazing
beasts back to life,” Dr. Steve said. “And just wait, because we'll have some
equally cool creatures cloned next year!”
Written by: Mr. Smiley
Photographer: Daniel P. Smithwater
Edited by: Christian
Ryan
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