The 110-million-year-old fossil of the genus Nodosaurus, called the "four-legged tanks", is finally on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, Canada.
Excavator operator Sean Funk found the dinosaur on March 21, 2011 - while working at the Suncor Millenium Mine in Alberta, Canada. The man came across something different from the surrounding rock with a bucket and decided to take a closer look.
The fossil he discovered was sent to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, whose specialists spent the next 6 years working on extracting the animal from a piece of rock weighing 1,100 kilograms. After all this hard work, the finished result is ready for exposure.
According to the museum, it is the best preserved armored dinosaur in the world, including the skin and carapace of bone plates. He lived in the middle of the Cretaceous, between 110 and 112 million years ago. Such creatures were, on average, about 5 meters in length, weighed up to 1300 kg and had two 50-centimeter spikes sticking out of their shoulders.
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Scientists have not yet managed to get to the skeleton of the dinosaur, which remains mostly hidden in the skin and shell, because this would require the destruction of its outer layers. And computed tomography was ineffective, since the stone still remains an opaque substance.
As Michael Greshko wrote for National Geographic, this level of security is “as rare as winning the lottery. The more I look at him, the more he overwhelms me."