This armored plant-eater, 110 million years old and known as a nodosaur, is the best preserved fossil of its kind ever found.
Shawn Funk, a heavy equipment operator, was carving his way through the earth on March 21, 2011, unaware that he would soon meet a dragon.
At Suncor Energy’s Millennium Mine, a vast mine located 17 miles north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, that day began as any other. Bitumen-laced sands were the transformed remains of marine plants and animals that lived and died more than 110 million years ago, and Funk’s massive excavator wentbbled them up hour after hour. He rarely saw any other ancient life. He had dug for 12 years, and while he had found petrified tree stumps and fossilized wood, he had never found dinosaur bones or fossilized wood.
But somewhere around 1:30, Funk’s bucket hit something that was much harder than the rock around it. Strangely colored lumps fell from the till and onto the bank below. Funk and Mike Gratton, his supervisor, immediately began debating the walnut-brown rocks. Whether they were ribs or strips of fossilized wood, After that, they flipped over one of the lumps, and a strange pattern emerged: rows upon rows of gunmetal-gray stones surrounded by sand-colored brown disks.
Funk stated in a 2011 interview, “Right away, Mike was like, “We gotta get this checked out.” ” It was certainly nothing we had at any point seen.”
ANSWERING THE QUESTION
In its natural habitat, this massive herbivore, known as a nodosaur, measured 18 feet in length and weighed nearly 3,000 pounds. Although, when it was discovered in 2011, only the front half, from the snout to the hips, was intact enough to recover, researchers believe it initially fossilized whole. The specimen is the finest known nodosaur fossil.
Left: The nodosaur’s last meal may have left behind a group of masses that look like pebbles.
Right: Mark Mitchell, a technician at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, slowly removes the scaly footpad and foot of the nodosaur from the rock. The animal’s mysterious features will be preserved for years to come thanks to Mitchell’s meticulous work.
Nearly six years later, I visit the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s fossil preparation laboratory in Alberta’s windswept badlands. The noise of technicians using needle-tipped tools that look like miniature jackhammers to remove rock from bone fills the cramped warehouse. However, the 2,500-pound stone mass in the corner is my primary focus.
The reassembled gray blocks initially resemble a nine-foot-long dinosaur sculpture. Its neck and back are covered in a bony armor mosaic, and individual scales are outlined by gray circles. As if reaching for a tasty plant, its neck gracefully curves to the left. However, this is not a realistic sculpture. It is a real dinosaur with petrified hips and snout.
It becomes even more perplexing the more I look at it. The animal’s skull’s bumpy armor plates are still covered in fossilized skin. It has five splayed upward digits on its right forefoot, which is on its side. The sole’s scales can be counted by me. Caleb Brown, a postdoctoral specialist at the gallery, smiles at my wonder. ” He tells me later that “we don’t just have a skeleton.” We have a dinosaur in its natural state.
The incredible level of fossilization caused by the dinosaur’s rapid undersea burial is as uncommon for paleontologists as winning the lottery. Minerals rarely replace soft tissues before they rot, and typically only the bones and teeth are preserved. Additionally, there is no assurance that a fossil will maintain its original form. For instance, the feathered dinosaurs that were discovered in China were flattened out, and the “mummified” duck-billed dinosaurs that were discovered in North America, which are among the most complete dinosaurs that have ever been discovered, appear to have been sun dried out.
The nodosaur laid on its back while it was buried at sea, pressing the dinosaur’s skeleton into the armor and embossing it with some bones’ outlines. One wave in the reinforcement follows the creature’s right shoulder bone.
Paleobiologist Jakob Vinther, a specialist on creature hue from the U.K’s. College of Bristol, has concentrated on a portion of the world’s best fossils for indications of the color melanin. In any case, following four days of dealing with this one — carefully scratching off examples less than bits of ground Parmesan — even he is astonished. Vinther asserts that the well-preserved dinosaur “might have been walking around a couple of weeks ago.” This is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.
Behind Vinther is a wall that has a Night at the Museum poster on it. A magically brought back to life dinosaur skeleton emerges from the shadows on it.
A new species and genus of nodosaur, a type of ankylosaur that is frequently overlooked in comparison to its cereal box-famous relatives in the subgroup Ankylosauridae, can be seen in the remarkable fossil. Nodosaurs, like ankylosaurs, wore thorny armor to ward off predators, but unlike ankylosaurs, they did not have shin-splitting tail clubs. The 18-foot-long, nearly 3,000-pound behemoth was the rhinoceros of its time—a grumpy herbivore that largely kept to itself—when it galloped across the landscape between 110 and 112 million years ago, roughly halfway through the Cretaceous period. The nodosaur also had the solution in case something called, possibly the terrifying Acrocanthosaurus: two 20-inch-long spikes extending out of its shoulders like a lost sets of bull’s horns.
Protected from decay, this nodosaur’s distinctive plates, which are characteristic of armored dinosaurs, typically disintegrate early in decay. Scientists will gain a deeper understanding of how nodosaurs looked and moved thanks to the exceptionally well-preserved armor.
The brutally cold, windswept plains I encountered this past autumn were very different from the western Canada that this dinosaur knew. The area in the time of the nodosaur was similar to South Florida today, with conifer forests and fern-filled meadows and warm, humid breezes. The nodosaur could have even been looking out over the ocean. During the early Cretaceous, rising waters created an inland seaway that covered a large portion of what is now Alberta. The western shore of the seaway lapped against eastern British Columbia, where the nodosaur may have resided. These ancient seafloors are now covered in forests and wheat fields.
This land-hopping animal was unfortunate enough to drown in a river, possibly after being swept in by a flood. The midsection up remains wended its direction downriver — kept above water by gases that microorganisms burped into its body hole — and in the end cleaned out into the seaway, researchers construe. The bloated carcass burst after being blown eastward by the winds for about a week. The body sank backwards to the bottom of the ocean, spewing out soupy mud that covered it. Minerals penetrated the skin and defensive layer and supported its back, guaranteeing that the dead nodosaur would keep its consistent with living thing as ages of rock heaped on it.
The animal’s everlasting status depended on each connection in this improbable chain of occasions. It would have fossilized beyond Suncor’s property line if it had drifted on that ancient sea another few hundred feet. Instead, Funk came across the oldest Albertan dinosaur ever discovered, which was frozen in stone and looked like it was looking at Medusa.
Victoria Arbour, an armored dinosaur paleontologist at Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum, describes the discovery as “really exciting.” Arbour has observed the fossil throughout its preparation stages, but she is not involved in its research. It addresses such an alternate climate from today and such an alternate time, and it has extraordinary safeguarding.” ( Arbor has started concentrating on a correspondingly all around safeguarded ankylosaur found in Montana in 2014, quite a bit of which stays concealed inside a 35,000-pound block of stone. Arbour and her colleague David Evans published a description of the Montana ankylosaur on May 10. They gave it the name Zuul crurivastator, which means “Zuul, destroyer of shins,” after the monster in the movie Ghostbusters.)
A cross-section of the nodosaur’s bony core can be seen through a lucky break in its left shoulder spike. Keratin, which is the same material found in human fingernails, was used to cover the spike’s tip.
In more than one way, the specimen from Canada literally defies description. The staff at the museum were finishing up the creature’s scientific description at the time this article went to press, but they had not yet settled on a common name for it. Mrs. The name Prickley, a Canadian sketch comedy character, was dropped.) However, the fossil is already providing new information regarding the armor structure of nodosaurs. Due to the scattering of the bony plates, or osteoderms, early in the decaying process, repairing armor typically requires educated guesswork. Not in the least did the osteoderms on this nodosaur protect set up, however so did hints of the in the middle between.
Additionally, many of the osteoderms are still covered in sheaths made of keratin, the same material found in human fingernails. This allows paleontologists to precisely see how these sheaths increased the size and shape of the armor. Donald Henderson, the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s dinosaur curator, says, “I’ve been calling this one the Rosetta stone for armor.”
Liberating this Rosetta stone from its rough burial chamber, nonetheless, demonstrated an enormous errand.
Suncor promptly notified the Royal Tyrrell Museum when word of the discovery quickly spread through the organization. A Suncor jet carrying Henderson and Darren Tanke, a seasoned museum technician, flew to Fort McMurray. Shrouded in dust and diesel fumes, Suncor excavators and museum workers worked 12-hour shifts to remove the rock.
They eventually reduced it to a 15,000-pound rock that contained the dinosaur and was prepared to be lifted out of the pit. But disaster struck while cameras were rolling: The dinosaur was shattered into several pieces as the rock was lifted. The fossil’s cake-like interior, which was partially mineralized, simply could not bear its own weight.
Tanke worked all night on a strategy to save the fossil. While Tanke and Henderson searched for anything that could stabilize the fossil on the long drive to the museum the following morning, Suncor personnel wrapped the fragments in plaster of Paris. The crew substituted plaster-soaked burlap rolled up like logs for the timbers.
The MacGyver-like strategy paid off. The team reached the prep lab of the Royal Tyrrell Museum 420 miles later, where Mark Mitchell, a fossil preparator, was given the blocks. His work on the nodosaur required the skill of a sculptor: Over the course of the past five years, Mitchell has slowly removed the fossil’s skin and bone for more than 7,000 hours. The laborious procedure is comparable to extracting compressed talcum powder from concrete. He states, “You almost have to fight for every millimeter.”
Chocolate-brown ribs, tan osteoderms, and dark gray scales line the torso of the nodosaur. The dinosaur’s spine is joined by dark brown bands that look like jerky and once supported the dinosaur’s tail (top).
Although Mitchell’s battle is almost over, understanding the fossil he finds will take years, if not decades. For instance, most of its skeleton is still covered in armor and skin. Here and there it’s excessively all around safeguarded; Destroying the dinosaur’s outer layers would be necessary for reaching its bones. Because the rock remains stubbornly opaque, CT scans funded by the National Geographic Society have revealed little.
The smallest aspect of the nodosaur fossil may hold the most revolutionary characteristics for Vinther: infinitesimal leftovers of its unique tinge. On the off chance that he effectively remakes its circulation, he could assist with uncovering how the dinosaur explored its current circumstance and utilized its articulated covering.
He says, “Those elaborated horns on the front of its body would have been almost like a billboard” and “This armor was clearly providing protection.” This advertisement may have stood out against a background of rouge and could have assisted in wooing friends or intimidating rivals. In contrast to the pale color of the horns, chemical tests of the dinosaur’s skin have suggested the presence of reddish pigments.
In May the Regal Tyrrell Gallery reveals the nodosaur as the focal point of another display of fossils recuperated from Alberta’s modern locales. Now, what has impressed scientists for six years is being marveled at by the general public: a man with an excavator discovered an ancient Canadian ambassador in a moonscape.
