If you are part of a certain generation, chances are you were introduced to paleontology by Dr. Alan Grant, who was digging up a velociraptor in the beginning of “Jurassic Park.” So we’re pretty used to seeing dinosaur bones at this point but when something this incredible gets found, we just have to talk about it.
A Borealopelta markmitchelli more than 110 million-years-old has been found preserved with so much detail, you can see the facial structure with skin still on it. There are visible scales; you can view its entire spiky back down to the tail. This specimen is a nodosaur which is a type of ankylosaur, which means the tail comes to a point instead of having a club at the end. Nodosaur was an herbivore lived on land, and according to scientists, weighed a whopping 3,000 pounds. To give you an idea about just how intact this find is, it still weighs 2,500 pounds.
Using this fossil, scientists discovered what the skin and scale pigment was. It was a dark reddish brown on the top, and like a lot of reptiles, had a lighter underbelly. They’ve also estimated it’s predators must have been very dangerous due to the thickness of the skin.
[View photos of the find here.]
It was found by workers in a mine north of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2011. It is an area where one would typically find ancient marine life. This discovery makes Borealopelta markmitchelli the best-preserved armored dinosaur in the world.
The working theory is the dinosaur crossed on land, and was carried by a river or flood water out to the sea. Float and bloat made it buoyant for a time, then it sank to a depth no other creature liked to go.
“We can see it went in water deeper than 50 meters because it was preserved with a particular mineral called glauconite, which is a green phosphate mineral,” Dr. Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Canada, said. “And it only forms in cooler temperatures in water deeper than 50 meters.” Which is probably why the corpse was not consumed by a plesiosaurs or other big fish.
Because of the favorable conditions the fossil was discovered in, we now have a really good idea of what this dinosaur looked like when it was alive.
