Weekly Online Lesson Online Lesson Archive Grade Level: 3-7 Subject: Science

Dinosaur Heart

On April 17, 2000, paleontologists at North Carolina State University announced that they found a dinosaur with a fossilized heart. It's the first dinosaur heart ever to be found, and it's giving scientists new clues about how dinosaurs evolved and how they lived.

The fossil, nicknamed Willo, is now on display at the new North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences building. Maybe that's too far away for you to visit in person, but you can learn about Willo and how scientists found Willo's heart in this week's online lesson.

Willo, the Dinosaur with a Heart

The best place on the Web to learn about Willo is www.dinoheart.org. Read the introduction on the home page, and then click Media Kit to read the press release about the announcement. This will answer a lot of questions you might have, such as How did Willo gets its name? Where was Willo found? How did researchers find Willo's heart?

If you don't find answers to your questions, try the Fast Facts page. You will find some other cool facts there too, like Willo's size and approximate weight.

Click Willo Inside Out to go straight to the heart of the site—Willo's guts. Here's where you can see a picture of Willo's heart with a diagram showing the different parts. On most browsers you can roll your mouse over the name of each part and see where it is in the picture. Also, look on the page for links to Quicktime movies of the heart; you can watch these if you are using a multimedia computer.

Map of the Human Heart

Not sure what all those heart parts are in the diagram of Willo? It's tough stuff, but it might help if you can compare the diagram of Willo's heart to a human heart. After all, all hearts are designed to do the same thing: move blood through the body.

Browse to the Map of the Human Heart, hosted by Nova Online. The animated graphic on this page shows how blood flows into the human heart, and how the heart pumps it out to other parts of the body. What parts of Willo's heart are the same as a human heart?

What's really exciting about Willo's heart is that it has four chambers, so it's more like a mammal than a reptile. This suggests that at least some dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded, not cold-blooded like reptiles.

CT Scans

Scientists found Willo's fossilized heart by doing a CT scan of the thoracic cavity (the chest area). What is a CT scan (sometimes pronounced "cat" scan) and what are they used for?

CT scans are normally used for medical purposes. It's like getting an x-ray in 3-D. One place where you can find out more about CT Scans is Knowledge Adventure's CT Scan site. If you want to see a few CT Scan pictures, try the MRI and CT Information page. How did this kind of scan help scientists identify Willo's heart?

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