Self-taught fossil specialist Terry Manning uncovered his first dinosaur embryo from an ancient egg in 1993. More than 30 embryos and nearly three decades later, hardly anyone has laid eyes or hands on his rare specimens.
His days would start promptly, like a banker’s — except he also worked weekends. At 8:30 each morning, Terry Manning would step outside his two-story brick house on Gipsy Lane in Leicester, England, walk through the yard, let himself in the house next door, climb the stairs and take a seat at his workbench, with a view onto the garden out back.
When his first specimens surfaced in the early ’90s, they were “revolutionary,” says Jeff Liston, president of the European Association of Vertebrate Palaeontologists. Manning had revealed dinosaur embryo skeletons and what may be soft tissues such as cartilage, both of which are exceedingly rare in paleontological research. Yet nearly 30 years later, only about half of Manning’s collection has ever appeared in public, at a single exhibit in 1995.
In 1985, he was working at a museum in Moscow when he encountered a group of dinosaur eggs that had been dug up in Mongolia. He peered through the cracks in one shell, and had a vision. “Through the hole, inside the egg, I saw calcite,” he says.
Decades later, speaking on the phone from his current home in Tucson, Arizona, he says, “I loved it. The only time I stopped [working] was about half past 5:00.” It took about four months of this daily routine in Leicester for Manning to uncover his first embryo.The big reveal of Manning’s work, at the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, earned a review in the March 24, 1995, issue of the journal.
Liston, an early supporter of Manning’s work, would go on to write a paper published in 2013 about another obstacle facing the eggs and embryos. Before the exhibition, the Chinese government passed a law reclassifying dinosaur eggs from “trace fossils” to “vertebrate fossils.” This means they went from bearing “evidence of an animal … [to] the animal itself — a major reclassification,” according to John Nudds, one of the few scientists to publish research on Manning’s work.
The only problem, recalls the paleontologist, was that his museum’s director was “very anti- the idea,” seeing it as unethical. Nonetheless, Nudds promised Manning he would do everything in his power to make sure his work received the scientific recognition it deserved. “One of the issues is that Terry Manning has been seen as outside the discipline,” Unwin says today. “It’s a huge issue, an elitist attitude. We do tend to be an exclusive club, and that’s a problem.”A couple years after the $3 million deal fell through, Manning and Nudds met with Ji Qiang at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences. He agreed to give temporary access numbers to the best specimens. This allowed one scientific paper to publish findings in 2008, before the access number expired.
Chiappe was supposed to take the egg on a plane to Buenos Aires on March 6, 2020. The coronavirus pandemic cancelled that flight, quarantining the prized specimen in Chiappe’s Los Angeles office for nearly two years. But, finally, a coveted accession number accompanied it, which made theNew York Times, Smithsonian, New Scientist
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