Known as a nodosaur, this 110 million-year-old, armored plant-eater is the best-preserved fossil of its kind ever found.
If I sit and meditate, I can barely visualize what it must have been like on this planet just 100 years ago. The Cubs winning the World Series really put time in perspective, and it breaks my brain when I realize just how short our life spans are in comparison. This is why dinosaurs are so mesmerizing. While we know what humans look like, there’s something extraordinary about attempting to piece together the bones of creatures that inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. While we have artist renderings of what a dinosaur may have looked like, and movies like Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park suggesting looks, sounds, and actions, we’ll never actually know what’s reality. Or can we?
National Geographic shares the most astonishing of images of a dinosaur found accidentally by miners in Canada.
The writer visits the fossil prep lab at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in the windswept badlands of Alberta, describing the massive 2,500-pound mass of stone:
“At first glance, the reassembled gray blocks look like a nine-foot-long sculpture of a dinosaur. A bony mosaic of armor coats its neck and back, and gray circles outline individual scales. Its neck gracefully curves to the left, as if reaching toward some tasty plant. But this is no lifelike sculpture. It’s an actual dinosaur, petrified from the snout to the hips.”
“The more I look at it, the more mind-boggling it becomes,” he continues. “Fossilized remnants of skin still cover the bumpy armor plates dotting the animal’s skull. Its right forefoot lies by its side, its five digits splayed upward. I can count the scales on its sole. Caleb Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the museum, grins at my astonishment. ‘We don’t just have a skeleton,’ he tells me later. ‘We have a dinosaur as it would have been.’”
The remarkable fossil is a newfound species (and genus) of nodosaur, a type of ankylosaur often overshadowed by its cereal box–famous cousins in the subgroup Ankylosauridae.
“Unlike ankylosaurs, nodosaurs had no shin-splitting tail clubs, but they too wielded thorny armor to deter predators. As it lumbered across the landscape between 110 million and 112 million years ago, almost midway through the Cretaceous period, the 18-foot-long, nearly 3,000-pound behemoth was the rhinoceros of its day, a grumpy herbivore that largely kept to itself. And if something did come calling—perhaps the fearsome Acrocanthosaurus—the nodosaur had just the trick: two 20-inch-long spikes jutting out of its shoulders like a misplaced pair of bull’s horns.”
You can see a ton of wild images and read this fascinating story in full over at National Geographic.