Students, community members, Winona State University staff, and a boy in the audience with his own dinosaur figure sat in attendance and chatted with others in anticipation in the Science Laboratory Center 120. The Curse of the Dinosaur Mummy talk and Q&A was held on Oct. 13 and was one of many of the sessions in the Earth Talks Speaker Series.
Professor Dr. W. Lee Beatty is a Geoscience professor and is also the chair of the Geoscience Department at Winona State. Beatty earned his Bachelor’s Degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Earth Science from Penn State University and a PhD in Geology from the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Candace L. Kairies-Beatty is a geoscience professor and kicked off the event introducing Beatty to the audience.
“After completing a post-doctoral fellowship with the U.S. Department of Energy National Energy Technology Lab, he joined the faculty here at Winona State in 2009. For more than a decade, his work has focused on dinosaur ecosystems, and since 2013, he has led paleontology digs in North Dakota’s famous Oak Creek Formation, helping to bring a world of dinosaurs to life for hundreds of families, fossil-enthusiastic enthusiasts, and undergraduate students.”
Beatty began his talk breaking down what a dinosaur mummy is to audience members and the history of discoveries of them.
“When we think about mummies we all have a certain image in our mind that a dinosaur mummy isn’t a chemically-treated, linen-wrapped human corpse, like you might imagine if you’re thinking of an Egyptian mummy,” Beatty said. “A dinosaur mummy is a nearly complete fossil that preserves some traces of soft tissues or skin, tendons, or muscle alloys, and occasionally organic material. A dinosaur mummy is very different than a human mummy.”
The first dinosaur mummy that was ever discovered was found in 1908 by the fossil hunter Charles Sternberg and his sons while they worked in the Upper Cretaceous Lance Formation in Wyoming. The Lance Formation is a group of rocks that are between 70 and 66 million years old. This mummy from a Edmontosaurus dinosaur was the first ‘good evidence,’ as Beatty puts it, that dinosaurs had tough and scaly hides that could be preserved under special burial conditions.
While more dinosaur mummies were discovered decades later and one even destroyed on a sunken ship, Beatty then led audience members to the main focus of the talk: Medusa.
Medusa is a mummy fossil that was discovered in the summer of 2024 by an alum of the Geoscience Department at Winona State in the Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation in the Badlands in North Dakota.
“This is about a 100 meter thick unit of rock that’s made up of terrestrial sedimentary rocks deposited between 67 and 66 million years ago. It represents the last 1.4 million years of what we think about as the age of dinosaurs,” Beatty said. “The Hell Creek Formation is made up of sandstones, mudstones, right, these little terrestrial sedimentary rocks, coal from time to time…This part of North America was right on the edge of a large inland sea that was in the process of receding.”
The Medusa fossil was discovered on the top of a butte on a fiber branch. This discovery would soon begin a long and strenuous process.
“The very top of the butte is capped by this massive sandstone fossil. So there’s a big kind of sandstone cap here and there it is…Good night, everybody,” laughing with the audience Beatty said. “This is what the site looked like when it was discovered. And I’ll point some things out to you, and then I’ll say, no, trust me, you’re moving it.”
From discovering and excavating, Beatty along with his crew were successful, but what work and knowledge were needed to do this task?
“The proportions and the shapes of these exposed bones tell us that this is an advanced surface and more importantly the bones are articulated…Most of them were encased in this hard sandstone concretion. This is why we can’t see very much of the skeleton,” Beatty said. “The animal’s remains are lying on its right side, but we’re missing the head, and we’re missing its tail. Those pieces are gone. The reason why those pieces are gone is that the outcrop essentially fell away from the body in three directions. The anterior part of the body, where the head is, the dorsal part of the body, where the spine is, and the posterior part of the body, where the tail is…Immediately, you see there’s a lot more to be done with this site.”
First Beatty and the crew laid out a grid so they could create a complete map of the locations of all of the bones and bone fragments before anything was removed.
“The next task is to start collecting and cataloging the bone fragments in each grid. We go through one grid square at a time, collect everything that’s there, and catalog it so that eventually, we can match up these loose fragments with the bones that they came from and hopefully, they can all be attached back,” Beatty said. “When those pieces tumbled down, they broke open and they exposed the bone…The sandstone is pretty tough, but the bone is pretty weak so the bone erodes away almost immediately.”
But the crew soon would find big sandstone concretion pieces that were still there that would lead to an interesting discovery.
“We got together, looked at it, and said ‘boy, that’s weird.’ But one weird piece of rock at a dig site is pretty common, right? There’s a lot of weird stuff that you’ll find at a dig site so, we set it aside, marked where it was from, and we figured, ‘well, okay, we’ll come back to it later on’,” Beatty said. “The next day, down in the same gully, another one of our workers discovered another weird piece of sandstone that was basically the same as the first one that we found the previous day. One weird piece of sandstone is just a weird piece of sandstone, two weird pieces of sandstone that are the same tells you there’s something weird going on at your dig site and you want to start looking into it.”
The second ‘weird’ piece of sandstone looked suspiciously like scales to the team. Immediately, they started combing the whole site for more examples of this scaly-looking sandstone and once they started looking for them, they started finding them.
“One after another, we found a bunch of these so, it was then that we knew that maybe we’ve got another example of a dinosaur mummy at this site. We haven’t even looked at all yet at the articulated part of the fossil that’s inside that concretion,” Beatty said. “This is just all of the junk that had broken off and fallen down there so excavating such a rare fossil, there are only a handful of these in the entire world, it’s extremely exciting. There’s a lot of really difficult work and painstaking work and this site is probably more difficult and more painstaking than any of the sites that we’ve worked on in the last 10 or 12 years.”
Carrying their gear, tools, lumber, plaster, and water, their mile hike from where they can park and their digging site may seem easy but with a giant gully they have a 150-foot climb to get up. Not to mention almost all of the work that was done cataloging and prepping for excavation they were falling off the side so they had to anchor themselves into the side of a sandy slope, only allowing about 5-10 minutes of work before the slope would give in and they would have to climb up again.
“The weather can change without any sort of notice at all. They have both kinds of weather in North Dakota, brutal sun with 90 plus degree heat or torrential downpour thunderstorms…Then there’s the added feature that any time it rains in the Badlands, the ground becomes really treacherous because the mud basically becomes so slick, you can’t stand on it,” Beatty said. “Of course, one day we got caught in the Badlands when it rained. There was a thunderstorm that came down on top of us basically out of nowhere. We just got the site covered up and the sky opened up on us. It was the most punishing rain I have ever experienced in my entire life. We had to climb down 150 feet of altitude and hike the mile back out to the vehicles while being beaten, literally, about the head and shoulders by rain.”
If the rain wasn’t enough just wait till Beatty mentions the rattlesnakes home to the Badlands. Rattlesnakes were all over the top of the butte so every day they had to clang on all of the rocks that went up the site to drive the snakes away. They were also very mindful about where they stepped, sat and even where they put their hands.
Loose material was cleared off the site at the end of the 2024 season. Then this past summer, they started excavating the site with the goal of pulling that fossil down off the outcrop.
A lot of digging was done to execute Medusa, digging with shovels and with a jackhammer to prepare it to be covered in foil and burlap to be plastered. Several days were spent putting strip and strip of burlap to complete the plastering process. More and more digging had to be done to cradle the Medusa as it got flipped upside down to get the bottom plastered to prevent anything from falling out.
“Now, as we speak, the dinosaur is sitting on top of the butte in its jacket, waiting for the next part of its journey to its new home, which is going to be here at Winona State. Once we get the dinosaur here, we’re going to start preparing it, conserving it, and removing the body from that big sandstone concretion,” Beatty said. “Ultimately, after the dinosaur is prepared, we want to put it on display here at Winona State so students and researchers from all places and the community can come and experience our very own dinosaur monument firsthand.”
This discovery can give Winona State direct evidence of dinosaur biology to bridge the gap between skeletons and living animals. This evidence helps expand understanding on how these dinosaurs were like when they were alive. A Q&A session was held after the talk and one question was asked how the name Medusa came about from the dinosaur mummy.
“That’s a long story but, if you think about it, Medusa lived in a very treacherous and rocky island. And had snakes for hair. And no longer has her head.” Betty said laughing along with the audience and ready to answer the next question from students, community members, and staff.
