Dark5 | 5 Dinosaur Photos that Reveal What They Looked Like in Real Life @dark5tv | Uploaded 3 years ago | Updated 1 day ago
It took experts at the Royal Tyrrell Museum almost five years and thousands of painstaking hours to expose this dinosaur’s skin and bones. From nose to hips, the fossil reveals the scaly armor of the 3,000-pound herbivore as it looked when alive. Discovered in 2011 during an excavation at a Canadian mine, it is the best-preserved fossil of a dinosaur ever found...
Royal Tyrrell Museum curator Donald Henderson calls this fossil the (QUOTE) “Rosetta stone for armor.” The best-preserved fossil of a nodosaur ever found was dug out from a mine in Alberta.
Around 110 to 112 million years ago, the biting coldness of central Canada is believed to have resembled today’s South Florida. The specimen would have lived in a warm and humid climate among conifer forests and meadows.
In the early Cretaceous, the land known today as Alberta was blanketed by rising waters that carved an inland seaway. It’s likely that a flooded river carried the dinosaur away, sinking it back-first into the seabed. Its quick underwater burial and the millions of years of accumulated layers preserved the fossil incredibly well.
In 2011, Shawn Funk, a heavy-equipment operator, was working on the excavation when his bucket clipped something rough and oddly-colored lumps came to sight. The 15,000-pound rock was then carried 420 miles to the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s prep lab.
Half the fossil remained intact, revealing the mammal’s scaly armor as it looked back then. A mosaic of armor tiles coated its neck and back, while gray circles outlined individual scales.
Moreover, after working on it for many years by a team led by fossil preparator Mark Mitchel, its well-preserved skin and bones were slowly exposed. Mitchel said: (QUOTE) “You almost have to fight for every millimeter.”
Behind its hollow eyes, the nodosaur had 20-inch spikes on its shoulders, used as a defense against attacks. The grumpy herbivore, 18-foot long and weighing 3,000 pounds, was the rhinoceros of its day.
The statue-like fossil looks so life-like that museum researcher Caleb Brown announced: (QUOTE) “We don’t just have a skeleton, we have a dinosaur as it would have been.”
It took experts at the Royal Tyrrell Museum almost five years and thousands of painstaking hours to expose this dinosaur’s skin and bones. From nose to hips, the fossil reveals the scaly armor of the 3,000-pound herbivore as it looked when alive. Discovered in 2011 during an excavation at a Canadian mine, it is the best-preserved fossil of a dinosaur ever found...
Royal Tyrrell Museum curator Donald Henderson calls this fossil the (QUOTE) “Rosetta stone for armor.” The best-preserved fossil of a nodosaur ever found was dug out from a mine in Alberta.
Around 110 to 112 million years ago, the biting coldness of central Canada is believed to have resembled today’s South Florida. The specimen would have lived in a warm and humid climate among conifer forests and meadows.
In the early Cretaceous, the land known today as Alberta was blanketed by rising waters that carved an inland seaway. It’s likely that a flooded river carried the dinosaur away, sinking it back-first into the seabed. Its quick underwater burial and the millions of years of accumulated layers preserved the fossil incredibly well.
In 2011, Shawn Funk, a heavy-equipment operator, was working on the excavation when his bucket clipped something rough and oddly-colored lumps came to sight. The 15,000-pound rock was then carried 420 miles to the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s prep lab.
Half the fossil remained intact, revealing the mammal’s scaly armor as it looked back then. A mosaic of armor tiles coated its neck and back, while gray circles outlined individual scales.
Moreover, after working on it for many years by a team led by fossil preparator Mark Mitchel, its well-preserved skin and bones were slowly exposed. Mitchel said: (QUOTE) “You almost have to fight for every millimeter.”
Behind its hollow eyes, the nodosaur had 20-inch spikes on its shoulders, used as a defense against attacks. The grumpy herbivore, 18-foot long and weighing 3,000 pounds, was the rhinoceros of its day.
The statue-like fossil looks so life-like that museum researcher Caleb Brown announced: (QUOTE) “We don’t just have a skeleton, we have a dinosaur as it would have been.”
