The recently discovered dinosaur ‘mummy’ is exceptionally well-preserved, with its skin and internal organs completely intact.  

Scientists consider this to be the best-preserved dinosaur specimen ever discovered. That’s why you can’t see his bones – they’re still covered with skin and intact armor.

Accidentally found by miners in Canada, this fossil dinosaur is more than 110 million years old, but the patterns are still visible on its skin. According to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta, Canada, which recently published the find, the dinosaur is so well preserved that instead of “fossil”, we can safely call it It’s all “dinosaur mummies”. 

The researchers who examined the find were amazed at its almost unprecedented level of conservation. The creature’s skin, armor and even some intestines were still intact – something they had never seen before.

“You don’t have to use a lot of imagination to rebuild it; if you squint a little, you can almost think he’s asleep,” said one researcher.

Previously, people only discovered skeletons of nodosaur dinosaurs that looked like this

This dinosaur was built like a tank. A member of a newly discovered species called nodosaur, it was an enormous four-legged herbivore protected by a spiky, plated armor. It weighed approximately 3,000 pounds.

To give you an idea of how intact the mummified nodosaur is: it still weighs 2,500 pounds!

Although how the dinosaur mummy was able to stay so intact for such a long time remains a mystery, the researchers suggest that the dinosaur dinosaurs may have been washed away by a river. floods and washes out to sea, where it eventually sinks to the ocean floor.

Over millions of years, minerals may have deposited on dinosaur armor and skin. This may help explain why this organism has been preserved in such a realistic form.

The researchers named the 5.5-meter (18-foot) nodosaur Borealopelta markmitchelli, after Royal Tyrrell Museum technician Mark Mitchell, who spent more than 7,000 hours carefully digging the fossils out of the tomb. its stone. 

But how ‘lifelike’ is the specimen really? Well, apparently the preservation was so good that researchers were able to tell the dinosaur’s skin color by using mᴀss spectrometry techniques to detect the actual pigments.

This way they found out that the nodosaur’s coloring was a dark reddish brown on the top of the body – and lighter on the underside. Since this dinosaur was an herbivore, its skin color must have played a role in protecting it from the enormous carnivores present at the time.

And the fact that we’re talking about a mᴀssive, heavily-armored dinosaur illustrates just how dangerous those predators must have been…

The nodosaur was found by an unsuspecting excavator operator that uncovered the historic discovery while digging in an oil sands mine, according to the museum’s news release about the exhibit. 7,000 painstaking reconstruction hours later, the nodosaur was ready to meet the public.

As if the preservation of skin, armor, and guts weren’t impressive enough, the dinosaur mummy is also unique in that it was preserved in three dimensions, with the original shape of the animal retained.

A National Geographic video about the nodosaur, the best-preserved dinosaur ever discovered.

According to one researcher, “it will go down in science history as one of the most beautiful and best preserved dinosaur specimens – the Mona Lisa of dinosaurs.”