THIS IS A PALEONTOLOGICAL DETECTIVE STORY, a 65-miilionyear-old case so cold it s the hottest development in modern dinosaur-hunting. The victim, a hadrosaur was discovered in the Hell Creek Badlands of North Dakota in 1999 by an enthusiastic fossil hound named Tyler Lyson.

This book is more than a window into the far-distant past; it's -also an account of a century and more of paleontological pioneers and a vivid portrait of the state of the art in modern paleontology. Phillip Manning calls upon many scientific disciplines and employs such hightech tools as electron microscopes, LiDAR, and the world's largest CT scanner, originally built to examine NASA spacecraft, now put to work imaging the enormous ancient creature that died hundreds of millennia ago yet lives on as a fossil witness to a lost world entombed in stone.

Many of us have seen dinosaur bones and skeletons, maybe even dinosaur eggs...but what did those fearsome animals really look like in the flesh? Soft-tissue fossils give tantalizing clues about the appearance and physiology of the ancient animals. In this exciting book, paleontologist Phillip Manning presents the most astonishing dinosaur fossil excavations of the past 100 years—including the recent discovery of a remarkably intact dinosaur mummy in the Badlands of North Dakota.

Bone structure is just the beginning of our knowledge today, thanks to amazing digs like these. Drawing on new breakthroughs and cutting-edge techniques of analysis, Dr. Manning takes us on a thrilling, globe-spanning tour of dinosaur mummy finds—from the first such excavation in 1908 to a baby dinosaur unearthed in 1980, from a dino with a heart in South Dakota to titanosaur embryos in Argentina. And he discusses his own groundbreaking analysis of "Dakota," discovered by Tyler Lyson.

Using state-of-the-art technology to scan and analyse this remarkable discovery, National Geographic and Dr. Manning create an incredibly lifelike portrait of Dakota. The knowledge to be gained from this exceedingly rare find, and those that came before it, will intrigue dinosaur-loving readers of all ages.

CHAPTER ONE Death of a Dinosaur

CHAPTER TWO Old Fossils and New Tails

CHAPTER THREE Mummy

CHAPTER FOUR Dinosaur Mummies

CHAPTER FIVE Manchester in the Badlands

CHAPTER SIX Preparing the Campaign

CHAPTER SEVEN Excavating a Past World

CHAPTER EIGHT The Chemistry of Death

CHAPTER NINE Space Shuttles, Airplanes and Dinosaurs

CHAPTER TEN The Delicate Molecule of Life

CHAPTER ELEVEN Reconstructing Dinosaurs

CHAPTER TWELVE Making Dinosaurs Walk

Epilogue