Overview
- Researchers showed that two orange lichens, Rusavskia elegans and Xanthomendoza trachyphylla, preferentially colonize exposed dinosaur bones at Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta.
- The lichens covered up to about 50% of bone surfaces but less than 1% of nearby rock, providing a reliable biological indicator of fossil material.
- Drones flying roughly 30 meters above ground captured 2.5 cm per pixel imagery, with detection enabled by the lichens’ lower blue and higher infrared reflectance.
- The approach worked best in semi-arid badlands where bones remain exposed long enough for lichen growth, a constraint the team plans to test beyond the Canadian sites.
- The study, published November 3 in Current Biology, outlines potential scaling to aircraft or satellites after validating the method across regions and seasons.