In an unlikely team-up, paleontologists worked with lichen and drones to find more dinos!

A recent paper published in Current Biology used drones equipped with special sensors to help find dinosaur bones with the help of some friendly lichen!

In the Canadian Badlands (Alberta Provence) at Dinosaur Provincial park, a research team used the properties of certain species of bright orange lichens to ID fossils. These lichens thrive on the alkaline & calcium-rich porous substrates created by the fossils, while leaving the surrounding rock untouched, making discoveries in vast, difficult terrain much easier! 

How are drones involved in all this?

Paleontologists already noticed as early as the 1920s that these bright orange lichens grew on fossils – it’d be hard not to! But only now has the tech caught up. Drones with specialized sensors that can detect light’s wavelength and amplitude, called spectroradiometers, were used to capture aerial images at a high resolution of 2.5cm/pixel.

They were able to finely tune the spectroradiometers to pick up the lichen’s distinct spectral signature, as these lichens exhibit very specific spectral properties. The show lower reflectance in blue wavelengths at 400-500nm, and higher reflectance in infrared regions (800-1400nm). With detector attuned to this signature, the researchers could ID exposed bones from 30m in the air. 

Similar techniques had previously used lichen’s spectral reflectance as a way to ID caribou habitat (they eat lots of lichen!), and now it has been adapted for paleontology!

What species of dinosaur did they find?

The lichen was most obvious on large leg bones from dinosaurs from the late Cretaceous, mainly Ornithschians like hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs) and Ceratopsidae (triceratops & cie.). This makes sense, these are big Dinos with large, dense limb bones.

A little bonus technology, the team also did a DNA analysis to precisely determine which species of lichen they were working with, and identified two main species. We don’t yet know how long it takes lichen to colonize bone, since they grow very slowly – but this tech will help!

Future applications?

This tech is especially beneficial in remote locations and difficult terrain. But obviously, these lichen grow in very specific conditions that do not co-occur with all fossils. Nevertheless, the team predicts they could expand this technique beyond drones, to aircraft and satellites in the future, increasing the scale of fossil discovery.

Article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.09.036

As covered on a special weekend edition of the Daily Tech News Show on November 13th, 2025. For a more detailed discussion of the topic, listen here: