Credit: Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller, Canada
Phys.org has a story about the discovery of another "dinosaur mummy". A few years ago, a nodosaur found in Alberta, Canada was said to be the best preserved dinosaur ever. Now, researchers say they may have found an even better one. This specimen is a hadrosaur found in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. It's said to be "perfectly preserved".
Researchers in Canada have discovered parts of what they believe to be a full "dinosaur mummy" lodged in a hillside, the University of Reading in the United Kingdom announced last week.
The two exposed fossils, a foot and part of a tail clad in fossilized skin, are believed to belong to a juvenile duck-billed Hadrosaur dinosaur that died somewhere between 77 million to 75 million years ago, roughly 10 million years before dinosaurs went extinct, researchers said. Scientists began excavation of the site to remove the entire remains from the hill.
"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," Brian Pickles, a paleontologist and ecology professor at the University of Reading, told USA TODAY. "Which means, if we're really lucky, then some of the other internal organs might have preserved as well."
If the remains are in as good of shape as Pickles hopes, it would be one of the best preserved dinosaur fossils ever discovered and would provide scientists with a clearer picture of what the dinosaur looked like when it roamed the Earth.
