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New Nodosaurid found with soft tissue impressions
Topic Started: May 12 2017, 07:07 AM (1,020 Views)
Okeanos
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Quote:
 
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. 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.”

For paleontologists the dinosaur’s amazing level of fossilization—caused by its rapid undersea burial—is as rare as winning the lottery. Usually just the bones and teeth are preserved, and only rarely do minerals replace soft tissues before they rot away. There’s also no guarantee that a fossil will keep its true-to-life shape. Feathered dinosaurs found in China, for example, were squished flat, and North America’s “mummified” duck-billed dinosaurs, among the most complete ever found, look withered and sun dried.

Paleobiologist Jakob Vinther, an expert on animal coloration from the U.K.’s University of Bristol, has studied some of the world’s best fossils for signs of the pigment melanin. But after four days of working on this one—delicately scraping off samples smaller than flecks of grated Parmesan—even he is astounded. The dinosaur is so well preserved that it “might have been walking around a couple of weeks ago,” Vinther says. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

The Canadian specimen literally defies words, in more ways than one. As this article went to press, museum staff were finalizing the creature’s scientific description and hadn’t yet settled on a common name for it. (“Mrs. Prickley,” a reference to a Canadian sketch comedy character, didn’t stick.) But already the fossil is providing new insights into the structure of nodosaurs’ armor. Reconstructing armor usually requires educated guesswork, as the bony plates, called osteoderms, scatter early in the decaying process. Not only did the osteoderms on this nodosaur preserve in place, but so did traces of the scales in between.

What’s more, sheaths once made of keratin—the same material that’s in human fingernails—still coat many of the osteoderms, letting paleontologists see precisely how these sheaths exaggerated the armor’s size and shape. “I’ve been calling this one the Rosetta stone for armor,” says Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

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http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-nodosaur-fossil-discovery/

As far as I know the paper hasn't been released yet, but May seems to be shaping up to be the month of the Ankylosauria, what with Zuul crurivastator and now this
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babehunter1324
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The fossil it's so detailed and squashed... It kinda looks like a roadkill.
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Fireplume
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Snok Snok Snerson

^ I was thinking that as well, hahaha. It's a BEAUTIFUL specimen :O
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AnimalGenius
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Just a ZT Youtuber

The fossil looks amazing, very scaly and detailed. I'm surprised they found a fossil with the tissue imprints still there.
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Acinonyx Jubatus
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I AM THE UNSHRINKWRAPPER!

This is awesome. It's so utterly lifelike, you almost forget you're looking at a rock. That texture, though.
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Ignacio
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Ex Corrupt Staff

This is just stunning

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TheBlackLizard
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The crazy italian guy that loves Prehistoric Animals!

That's really an amazing discovery! This Ankylosaurid can give us lot of informations about their skin composition and their colour.
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PrimevalBrony
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Youtuber. Combat robotics fan

This fossil is absolutely gorgeous. A scaled dinosaur with pigments preserved is astounding. So astounding I gave it a nickname: Pulcherosaurus rubiginosus (Meaning: "Beautiful rusty reptile")
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AnimalGenius
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Just a ZT Youtuber

The face of that creature is astonishing! It looks so real!
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Posted Image Flish
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Honestly very happy to see some coloration found for a Thyreophoran. It makes perfect sense for them to have high contrast colors since they weren't exactly designed for hiding and running, but to have it confirmed is pretty nice.
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