Environment

Mummified dinosaur unearthed in North Dakota

by Amy Judd | March 18, 2008 at 09:34 am

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It is such a rare find. A complete mummified dinosaur, skin and all.
Staff at North Dakota's state museum are carefully freeing the dinosaur from its 65-million-year-old rock tomb.
There are only a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, but a find such as this will provide such an interesting glimpse into how the dinosaurs lived, and maybe how they died.

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It's among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb.

"This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Manchester University in England, a member of the international team researching Dakota.

"This is not the usual disjointed sentence or fragment of a word that the fossil records offer up as evidence of past life. This is a full chapter."

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Stuhacking

at 12:46 on March 18th, 2008

This Edmontosaurus skeleton is on display at the Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland and has been so for at least as long as I've been alive. The museum itself is currently closed for renovations since September 2007, due to reopen in 2010. I took a series of photos the day before closure as a reminder of what things looked like. The dinosaur room was one of my particular favourites.

Stuhacking has contributed a photo to this story.