In 2011, Shawn Funk headed to what he thought would be an ordinary day at work. He was the heavy equipment operator that shifted at Millennium Mine, but when he tried excavating what he thought was a rock, he and everyone at the dig site were about to find a 110 million-year-old secret.
Cracking The Boulder Open And Looking Inside
The giant boulder didn’t look like anything special, it had been stuck in the quarry wall and had only recently been exposed. Shawn used his heavy vehicle to try and move the rock, but that’s when it cracked.
They Had Stumbled Across Something Amazing
Shawn turned off his machine as he and the other miners decided to inspect the rock. They had all thought that the rock had an odd color, but other than that, they didn’t think much of it. But that’s when Shawn and his supervisor agreed that they had found something amazing.
Stumbling On A Piece Of History
To the men’s disbelief, they had stumbled upon not just a boulder, but a piece of history from millions of years ago. Once the boulder had cracked, they could see something that looked like an animal inside, but its features didn’t match any animal today.
One Of The Most Well-Preserved Fossils Ever
The animal fossilized inside looked nothing like what’s alive today, but more than just that, it didn’t look like a typical fossil. The men expected to see bones, but they saw something far more bizarre – scales.
An Archaeological Goldmine
The dinosaur fossil that they had found was the most intact in history. The dinosaur still has scales, and a lot of it was preserved. Months after their find, researchers started looking into the fossil, and it became an archaeological goldmine.
Recovering The Dinosaur
After years of careful extraction, archaeologists managed to recover most of the dinosaur. Once extracted, they had the most intact front of a dinosaur ever found.
New Information
After six years of research, some light was finally shed on the fossil. It was the fossil of a nodosaur and a new species that hadn’t previously been discovered.
Details About The Fossil
The scales that had been preserved were found to be made out of keratin, and because of the condition of the nodosaur, it was dubbed a “dinosaur mummy.” When it was alive, the animal weighed around 3,000 pounds and was 18 feet long.
A Glimpse Into The Dinosaur World
Most fossils found are normally just the bones of the dinosaur and, most times, not even a full skeleton. Shawn’s find meant that the near-intact dinosaur could give researchers a glimpse into the dinosaur world.
What It Looked Like
A lot of our recreations of what dinosaur’s look like are all through genetic evidence, but the nodosaur gave researchers a complete idea of what it looked like when it was alive. They could even see that it had a red pigment on its exterior.
Theories On How It Died
Because of where the nodosaur ended up, many researchers believe that the animal was swept away by a flood and deposited where they found it. This means no predators could get to the body, and there was little erosion as well.
A Juvenile
Despite being a hulking mass to us, it was likely that the nodosaur wasn’t that old and was a juvenile. It’s believed that the dinosaur wasn’t older than a few weeks.
Source:
110-million-year-old Dinosaur very well preserved discovered accidentally by miners in Canada
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