A team of palaeontologists has uncovered the earliest belly button ever found on a 125 million-year-old fossil of a dinosaur from the species Psittacosaurus, adding to the long list of recent scientific discoveries.
According to reports, the Psittacosaurus genus lived between 145 and 66 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period. Scientists found this belly button after exposing the specimen to a focused laser beam.
The Paleontologists revealed their results paper in the journal BMC Biology on June 7 and stated that they spotted a ‘thin trace of an umbilical scar’ that is a ‘slight misalignment in the pattern of the skin, which was scaled over the dinosaur’s abdomen and is the reptile equivalent of a mammalian belly button’.
Birds and reptiles get the nutrition they need from a yolk sac that is connected to their abdomens by blood vessels, but embryonic mammals get their nourishment from a placenta. These kinds of organisms leave an abdominal scar after hatching, and the yolk is absorbed into the body.
Most birds and reptiles have the scar vanish within a few days or weeks, but other reptiles, like alligators, might have the scar beyond sexual maturity. The discovery of this fossil has added to our knowledge of dinosaurs and indicates that some of them may have had delayed wound healing.
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Palaeontologist Michael Pittman, an Assistant Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said, ‘A team of palaeontologists used LSF imaging to identify distinctive scales that surrounded a long umbilical scar in the Psittacosaurus specimen, similar to scars in certain living lizards and crocodiles. We call this kind of scar a belly button, and it is smaller in humans. This specimen is the first dinosaur fossil to preserve a belly button, which is due to its exceptional state of preservation’.
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