Scientists call the found remains nothing less than the best preserved of all dinosaur specimens ever discovered. The reason is that after 110 million years, these bones remain covered with virtually intact skin.
Indeed, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta, Canada recently unveiled such a well-preserved dinosaur that many are accustomed to calling it not a fossil, but a full-fledged "dinosaur mummy".
Researchers are amazed at the almost unprecedented level of preservation - not only the skin and thorns, but even the insides are in excellent condition.
“We have more than just a skeleton,” researcher Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum told National Geographic. "We have a dinosaur as it was in life."
When this dinosaur - a member of a new species called Nodosaurus - was alive, it was a huge, four-legged herbivore protected by pointed armor and weighing about 3,000 pounds.
Today, the mummified nodosaurus is so intact that it still weighs 2,500 pounds.
How the dinosaur mummy could have remained so intact is a mystery, although, according to CNN, researchers suggest the creature “could have been swept away by a flooded river and carried out to sea, where it eventually sank. For millions of years, at the bottom of the ocean, minerals have taken place in dinosaur skin, retaining it in a realistic form, which is now on display."
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The mummy was discovered in 2011 by oil mine workers, and since then, it has taken researchers 7,000 hours over the past six years to test the remains and prepare them for display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, where visitors now have the opportunity to see the most real dinosaur ever seen. paleontology.