Discovered by miners in Alberta, Canada, it’s a ‘mummy’ of a nodosaur, a type of plant-eating armored dinosaur. And it is huge.
The animal has two 20-inch-long spikes on its shoulders, and, in life, it was 18 feet long and nearly 3,000 pounds.
Scientists call it perhaps the best-preserved fossil of its kind ever unearthed because its bones remain covered by intact skin and armor some 110 million years after the creature’s death.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada recently unveiled the dinosaur, which is so well-preserved that many are calling it not a fossil, but an honest-to-goodness “dinosaur mummy.”
The museum’s Dinosaur Hall houses one of the world’s largest displays of dinosaur remains, and the mummified nodosaur is the crown jewel of that display.
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I visited the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, located about 4 miles northwest of Drumheller, Alberta, while conducting research for my first book, Not by Fire but by Ice.
One of the highlights of my trip – other than viewing the incredible collection of dinosaur remains – was seeing the hoodoos in Alberta’s badlands for the first time.
Hoodoos typically consist of relatively soft rock topped by harder, less easily eroded stone that protects each column from the elements. The hoodoo tops are usually larger than the pillars on which they stand. The Alberta hoodoos that I saw measured about 20 feet tall and looked like apparitions out of a Dr Seuss book
I took some photos of them, but that was so long ago that I don’t remember where they are.
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December 2, 2020 at 07:55PM
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