China News Service, June 9. According to the Hong Kong Business Daily, a team formed by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and international paleontologists announced on the 8th that they successfully used laser imaging technology to make the first discovery on a 125-million-year-old fossil unearthed in China. A complete dinosaur belly button is the oldest record of an animal with a belly button found in the scientific community so far.
Wen Jiaqi, Assistant Professor of the School of Life Sciences at CUHK, said that using the laser fluorescence imaging technology developed by him, he re-examined the skin fossil of a two-meter-long bipedal herbivorous dinosaur Psittacosaurus during the Cretaceous period. Distinctive scales near the navel scar.
This feature is similar to some modern lizards and crocodiles, and the scar on the navel is also called the navel, but it is different from the relatively thin navel in humans.
Based on its special and excellent state of preservation, the fossil became the first fossil to retain a dinosaur's navel.
According to reports, dinosaurs are oviparous animals, so there is no umbilical cord, and the yolk in dinosaur eggs is directly connected to the body of land-based oviparous animals through a slit-like opening.
This umbilical opening is sealed when the animal is about to hatch, forming a unique long umbilical scar. Wen Jiaqi's research is the first to use actual fossil evidence to support the hypothesis that dinosaurs should have long umbilical scars.
Phil R. Bell, a professor at the University of New England in Australia, pointed out that this Psittacosaurus fossil is probably the most important fossil to study dinosaur skin.
With new laser imaging technology, the fossil continues to surprise the research team.