An pick up image of a “ mummified ” dinosaur went viral this weekend after National Geographicbroke the storyof the 110 - million - year - old armored works - feeder , a newfound mintage of nodosaur whose keen remains are now on presentation in the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta , Canada .
The ancient brute is manifestly a remarkable specimen — not just a few battered bone , but an entire wight , transformed into Harlan Fiske Stone with bits of the original soft tissue still preserved . When I first saw images of the beast , which was photographed for the June issue of National Geographic , I had to know how it came to be so well - preserved — and if there are other dino mummies like it . So I called up Caleb Brown , one of the paleontologists who has been studying the fogy since it was first excavate from the Alberta Tar Sands in 2011 .
He was quick to stress just how special this specimen was .
“ This is one of the well preserved dinosaur in the world , ” Brown said . “ The skin is made up of case-by-case scales — kind of hexagonal or octangular polygonal shape , interspersed with osteoderms , which are body armor . What sets it apart is each of those osteoderms has a layer of keratin — the same stuff your fingernail are made of . That is almost never preserved . ”
Brown added that while his squad ca n’t see the skeleton — because it ’s beneath hundreds of pounds of petrified dinosaur human body — they are currently using CT scanning to analyze the viscera as much as potential . “ We might eventually be capable to tell a bit about its internal organ , even its last meal , ” he said .
So , how does a monumental oaf of chassis manage to evade disintegration for 110 million years , last meal and all ? plain , we ca n’t turn back the clock and notice out . But knowledge of the surroundings that the nodosaur lived and died in has allowed Brown and his fellow worker to redo a potential scenario .
harmonize to Brown , back in the early- to mid - Cretaceous , Alberta would have been a very different place . “ A magnanimous , inland sea stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean — very warm , and very shallow . Most of the dinosaurs we determine are maintain near the coast , ” where big river organisation sent loads of sediment race into that inland ocean , trapping and fossilise chip of ancient animals that break down along the way .
But this dead dino was n’t found along a coastline , where it would have munched leafy greens in an surroundings similar to the Florida Everglades . It was base offshore , at the bottom of an ancient ocean seam . “ The brute was save in an environment it did n’t live in , ” Brown say . “ It would have been living on acres , and washed out to sea , ” credibly after it died .
By the time the panoplied carcase come in the ocean , the decomposition process would have begun — trillions of bacteria breaking down its cells and releasing noxious gases . Its body would have started to balloon like a great , unpleasant-smelling frame balloon , buoying it along on the warm shallow sea . Bloat and swim bladder , marine biologists call it . The putrid blistering pouch would continued on its merry way , until eventually , something caused it to explode .
“ At some period , it would have explode and settle rapidly , ” Brown said . “ We know that because we have this impingement crater conserve where it was notice . ”
After smash unceremoniously into the seafloor , the puncture nodosaur was in all likelihood sink under a thick bed of mud , protecting it from scavengers . low-down O layer at the bottom of the ocean could have also block decomposition . Eventually , the beast became petrify through and through , hard minerals put back its squashy gentle tissues . Although concord to Brown , the soft bit do n’t seem to be all go .
“ It ’s not just the texture of the skin , some of the organic fertiliser ” are still there , he said , add that he could n’t go into detail on the alchemy of the dino mummy just yet , as the results are pending issue . “ Most of the body has become petrified — my co - author wish to jest that it ’s in a sarcophagus . ”
And as for whether there are other dino mamma out there , waiting to be unearthed from the ancient seas ? Brown accentuate that the condition which lead to this nodosaur becoming rigidify whole are extremely strange . More unusual still is human beings happening to stick their shovels in exactly the proper speckle to find such a tool . But he does n’t doubt there are more petrified brute of the Cretaceous out there , swallowed whole by the Earth by some strange combination of death and physics .
“ There are almost for sure more out there , ” he enounce , noting that the nodosaur mummy was discovered by chance by a heavy equipment operator , who was excavating in an Alberta mine for the push ship’s company Suncor . “ I gauge the take home message is — whenever you are excavating rock and roll for a route cut , mine , whatever , be on the lookout for these important fossils . ”
[ National Geographic ]
BiologyGeologyPaleontologyScience
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