In classic detective stories, fingerprints often play a starring role.

Detectives hunt down all kinds of clues as to who done it and why, but often it's

those prints found on an incriminating object that

officially closed the case. It's not that our clever crime-solving heroes are obsessed with

the prince per se. It's just that sometimes that's all the physical evidence they may be able to

find. So it goes with paleontologists and their bones. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

We can easily picture these scientists at work on a dusty excavation site or in a lab, hunched over

fossilized remains of a creature that hasn't existed for 60 million-odd years. It's not that these

scientists aren't interested in other parts of dinosaur bodies.

It's just that the bones can sometimes be preserved for many millions of years in a way that soft tissue like organs and skin cannot.

So this is really exciting. New techniques and modern technology are now offering the first opportunities for researchers to gain information

about dinosaur brains, how big and complex they were and what sort of sensory perception

they supported.

Amy M. Balinoff is here to tell us more about this.

She is assistant professor at the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at Johns Hopkins

University and co-author of the Scientific American

article, What Was It Like to Be a Dinosaur? Amy, welcome to think. Thank you, Chris. I'm happy to be here.

Just so we are all clear at the outset, we're talking about new ways to visualize the brain case of T-Rex and other dinosaurs, right?

The idea that an actual brain from a prehistoric animal could be preserved,

as far as we still know, that is impossible, right?

So I wouldn't say impossible.

I would say very, very, very unlikely.

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