Paleontologists say they have discovered something they had despaired of ever finding: the heart of a dinosaur.
There it was, they reported yesterday, in the chest cavity of a dinosaur's fossil skeleton uncovered in South Dakota. Encased in a natural sarcophagus of stone, the heart was the size of a grapefruit and had fossilized into reddish-brown stone 66 million years ago.
Examining the stony material with computerized imaging technology, scientists came upon an even bigger surprise, one that could profoundly change theories of dinosaur physiology and the place of at least some of these creatures in the evolutionary history of life. Visible traces of the heart's internal structure revealed, the discoverers said, that the organ was more like the heart of a bird or mammal than any known reptile.
''It's truly amazing that this animal seems to have had such a highly evolved heart,'' Dr. Dale A. Russell of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh said in announcing the discovery. ''The implications completely floored me.''
The evidence for a four-chambered heart with a single aorta, Dr. Russell and his colleagues concluded, strongly suggested that this and perhaps many other dinosaurs had higher metabolisms than other reptiles. If this is true, they may have been warmblooded instead of coldblooded, like other reptiles, and thus could have engaged in more sustained activity in foraging and fighting, in chasing prey or escaping predators. Such advanced hearts are capable of distributing more completely oxygenated blood throughout the body.
The findings also seemed to strengthen the hypothesis, which has gained considerable support in recent years, that some dinosaurs were ancestors of today's birds, which are warmblooded.
''It's pretty surprising that they would find something like this,'' said Dr. Mark A. Norell, a dinosaur paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, who was not involved in the discovery. ''It's exciting to see another set of data to bolster our case for a close relationship between dinosaurs and birds.''
Dr. Norell said that Dr. Russell was an experienced dinosaur researcher with a reputation for cautious work. But others in the field will need to evaluate all the data from the analysis, he said, not just what is being published now. A report of the discovery is being published in today's issue of the journal Science.
''All of this will undergo critical review in the next couple of years,'' Dr. Norell said of the immediate findings and their potential implications. ''We will just have to wait and see how it shakes out.''
Dr. Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, said that he and some other dinosaur specialists had ''serious reservations'' about the putative heart discovery. He questioned whether internal organs could have been preserved in the sediments where the specimen was found. From a study of images of the presumed organ's interior, he said, it was not clear to him that the structure could with certainty be identified as a heart.
''I look forward to seeing the specimen,'' Dr. Sereno said, adding that he would like to examine it to see if there is a fine structure in it that could be coronary arteries.
In their journal report, Dr. Russell and colleagues urged that fossil hunters in the future make a point of looking for traces of soft tissue in their discoveries. Unlike teeth and bones, the tissues of organs usually decay rapidly, before they can be fossilized through the replacement of all organic material with minerals. The fossil retains the original shape and structure of the body part, if not the original matter and its cellular structure.
The scientists are not sure, but they suspect that when this dinosaur died it was almost immediately buried in waterlogged sand, perhaps the sediment beneath a stream. Submerged in such an oxygen-poor environment, some of the animal's tissues petrified before decomposition set in. Previously, the only known internal traces of dinosaurs were fossilized intestines found in sediments from a former lake bed in Italy.
Besides Dr. Russell, who is also a professor at North Carolina State University, the team that found and analyzed what may be the first known dinosaur heart included Paul E. Fisher, director of North Carolina State's Biomedical Imaging Resource Facility and a graduate student in paleontology; Dr. Michael Stoskopf, a comparative anatomist, and Dr. Reese Barrick, a paleobiologist, both at North Carolina State; Michael Hammer, an independent fossil collector from Oregon who found the dinosaur; and Dr. Andrew A. Kuzmitz, a physician in Ashland, Ore., who first examined the specimen with computerized tomography, or C.T., imaging scans.
The dinosaur in question was a plant-eating animal 13 feet long and weighing 660 pounds that lived and died not long before the extinction of all dinosaurs, which occurred about 65 million years ago. In 1993, Mr. Hammer found the skeleton embedded in sandstone in Harding County, in northwestern South Dakota. The fossils were acquired by the North Carolina museum three years later, where they are on display.