An international group of scientists working in Canada uncovered a fossil of a hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur, complete with rare fossilized skin.
The exposed fossil protrudes from a hillside in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada, revealing part of the hadrosaur’s tail and right hind foot.
Scientists believe the fossil may be of a juvenile. It is approximately 13 feet long, with fossils of adult hadrosaurs typically measuring 32 feet long.
The exposed portion is resting in a way that suggests to researchers a complete skeleton may rest under the rest of the hill. The exact species of hadrosaur can only be pinpointed if a skull is available to examine.
Furthermore, the exposed portion included fossilized skin. The scientists said it is rare for skin, a soft tissue early to decay after death, to last long enough to be fossilized.
“Another thing that makes this find unique is the fact that large areas of the exposed skeleton are covered in fossilized skin. This suggests that there may be even more preserved skin within the rock, which can give us further insight into what the hadrosaur looked like,” Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum said in an article from the University of Reading in Britain.
The survival of the fossilized skin in good condition has also given researchers hope for other fossilized soft tissue, such as internal organs.
“It’s so well preserved you can see the individual scales, we can see some tendons and it looks like there’s going to be skin over the entire animal. Which means, if we’re really lucky, then some of the other internal organs might have been preserved as well,” University of Reading paleontologist Brian Pickles told USA Today.
To fossilize the tissue so well, the hadrosaur corpse would have had to have been covered up quickly.
“This animal probably either died and then immediately got covered over by sand and silt in the river. Or it was killed because a river bank fell onto it,” Mr. Pickles said.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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