Dinosaur Fossil So Well Preserved It Looks Like A Statue

[sarahb 17,254]

(I won't add any Gaga references to this dino thread )

Before being assembled into something recognizable at a museum, most dinosaur fossils look to the casual observer like nothing more than common rocks. No one, however, would confuse the over 110 million-year-old nodosaur fossil for a stone.

The fossil, being unveiled today in Canada’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, is so well preserved it looks like a statue.

Even more surprising might be its accidental discovery, as unveiled in the June issue of National Geographic magazine.

On March 21, 2011, Shawn Funk was digging in Alberta’s Millennium Mine with a mechanical backhoe, when he hit “something much harder than the surrounding rock.” A closer look revealed something that looked like no rock Funk had ever seen, just “row after row of sandy brown disks, each ringed in gunmetal gray stone.”

What he had found was a 2,500-pound dinosaur fossil, which was soon shipped to the museum in Alberta, where technicians scraped extraneous rock from the fossilized bone and experts examined the specimen.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes — it was a dinosaur,” Donald Henderson, the curator of dinosaurs at the museum, told Alberta Oil. “When we first saw the pictures we were convinced we were going to see another plesiosaur (a more commonly discovered marine reptile).”

More specifically, it was the snout-to-hips portion of a nodosaur, a “member of the heavily-armored ankylosaur subgroup,” that roamed during the Cretaceous Period, according to Smithsonian. This group of heavy herbivores, which walked on four legs, likely resembled a cross between a lizard and a lion — but covered in scales.

This particular one, according to a news release, was 18 feet long and weighed around 3,000 pounds.

As Michael Greshko wrote for National Geographic, such level of preservation “is a rare as winning the lottery.” He continued:

The more I look at it, the more mind-boggling it becomes. Fossilized remnants of skin still cover the bumpy armor plates dotting the animal’s skull. Its right forefoot lies by its side, its five digits splayed upward. I can count the scales on its sole. Caleb Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the museum, grins at my astonishment. “We don’t just have a skeleton,” he tells me later. “We have a dinosaur as it would have been.”



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/05/12/rare-as-winning-the-lottery-new-dinosaur-fossil-so-well-preserved-it-looks-like-a-statue/?utm_term=.027992b5e7fc

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-nodosaur-fossil-discovery/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fbp20170512ngm-nodosaur&utm_campaign=Content&sf78275986=1

[FATCAT 60,982]

11 minutes ago, sarahb said:

(I won't add any Gaga references to this dino thread )

@PunkTheFunk is SHOOK!

 

That's crazy though, hopefully this can give archaeologists new discoveries.

[sarahb 17,254]

Just now, FATCAT said:

@PunkTheFunk is SHOOK!

 

That's crazy though, hopefully this can give archaeologists new discoveries.

*Paleontologists. Sorry nitpick 

With this and that actual dinosaur tail preserved in amber it's crazy to think what else might be discovered 

[2020Covid19IsOurs 6,901]

Quick Gaga make a Dino fur coat 

[Diamond Heart 4,400]

That looks so ****ing cool 

Crazy.

[ARTPOPe 10,169]

Wow, Madonna never looked better

[KURUSHITOVSKA 20,451]

And people still say they didn't exist 

[Irrelevant 20,293]

inb4 she wears a dino bone dress while performing Million Reasons, cause that song is seriously getting old for me

[Serendipity 7,821]

18 minutes ago, ARTPOPe said:

Wow, Madonna never looked better

and there it is  

[ARTPOPe 10,169]

3 minutes ago, Serendipity said:

and there it is  

Woah, I know she looks crude sometimes but calling her "it" is quite rude 

Jk

Back to topic: That's so fascinating. There are so many things still hidden. The other day I was reading about an ancient plant species brought back to life from an 2000 year old seed. Our world is so cool, despite global warming.