These illustrations depict a potential pathway by which a dinosaur carcass could be transformed into a "mummy," like the fossil shown on the right. (Image credit: Paleoart by Becky Barnes, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/))
LiveScience has a story about "Dakota" a dinosaur mummy from North Dakota. "Dakota", a duck-billed dinosaur that lived about 67 million years ago in what is now North Dakota, is a mummified dinosaur which exhibits evidence of predatory behavior in its remains. A paper in the journal PLOS One describes this evidence and proposes that dinosaur mummification may be somewhat common.
"There used to be an assumption that, in order to get a mummy, you absolutely had to have rapid burial," meaning the dinosaur would have to be buried almost instantaneously at or near its time of death, said Stephanie Drumheller, co-lead author of the study and a palaeontologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Once a dinosaur's body was covered in sediment, perhaps from a sudden landslide or flash flood, the remains would be shielded from the elements and from the teeth of hungry scavengers. That gave the animal's skin a chance to mummify.
Now, Drumheller and her colleagues have identified another means of making dinosaur mummies — no rapid burial required. Instead, these mummies may have been buried weeks or months postmortem, after all sorts of scavengers, from crocodilians to microbes, had nibbled at their bodies. And by snacking on the corpses, scavengers may have helped ready them for fossilization.
