May 13, 2017 11:23 PM
(This post was last modified: May 14, 2017 12:16 AM by Yazata.)
A complete petrified dinosaur has been found at a mining site in northern Alberta. It isn't just dinosaur bones, it's the whole thing including soft tissues.
It was apparently a large Nodosaur, a bulky armored plant-eater common in the Cretaceous that got caught near a river during a flood at a time when the area east of what is now the Rockies was an inland subtropical sea (apparently the coast was heavily wooded with conifers). The dinosaur got washed out to sea, died and was embalmed in the mud on the ocean floor near the river-mouth. Now the same area is high-plains in western Canada but the dinosaur's remains were still there in the sedimentary rock. This example was about 18 feet long and weighed 3,000 pounds in life, so it war pretty big. They say that even some of this dinosaur's anatomical features are petrified in there, tendons and things. They were only able to extract the front half of the specimen, but it's still the best fossil Nodosaur ever found.
The Nodosauridae taxonomic group which contained multiple genera appeared before 150 million years ago and lasted until the dinosaurs disappeared about 66 million years ago. That period extends from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous. So they were around a long time in various models and options. This particular individual lived about 110 million years ago.
The fossil has been handed over to the paleontologists at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta:
http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com/about/a_brief_history.htm
The story is here:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazi...discovery/
A photo of its head is here, with its heavily armored back behind:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/conten...e-face.jpg
And an artist's impression of what one of these nodosaurs might have looked like alive is here (note the similarity to the petrified specimen, the artist got it pretty much right):
http://dontmesswithdinosaurs.com/wp-cont...dosaur.jpg
Here's Wikipedia's short little article on the Nodosauridae:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodosauridae
It was apparently a large Nodosaur, a bulky armored plant-eater common in the Cretaceous that got caught near a river during a flood at a time when the area east of what is now the Rockies was an inland subtropical sea (apparently the coast was heavily wooded with conifers). The dinosaur got washed out to sea, died and was embalmed in the mud on the ocean floor near the river-mouth. Now the same area is high-plains in western Canada but the dinosaur's remains were still there in the sedimentary rock. This example was about 18 feet long and weighed 3,000 pounds in life, so it war pretty big. They say that even some of this dinosaur's anatomical features are petrified in there, tendons and things. They were only able to extract the front half of the specimen, but it's still the best fossil Nodosaur ever found.
The Nodosauridae taxonomic group which contained multiple genera appeared before 150 million years ago and lasted until the dinosaurs disappeared about 66 million years ago. That period extends from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous. So they were around a long time in various models and options. This particular individual lived about 110 million years ago.
The fossil has been handed over to the paleontologists at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta:
http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com/about/a_brief_history.htm
The story is here:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazi...discovery/
A photo of its head is here, with its heavily armored back behind:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/conten...e-face.jpg
And an artist's impression of what one of these nodosaurs might have looked like alive is here (note the similarity to the petrified specimen, the artist got it pretty much right):
http://dontmesswithdinosaurs.com/wp-cont...dosaur.jpg
Here's Wikipedia's short little article on the Nodosauridae:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodosauridae
![[Image: ankylosaurus-info-graphic.png]](http://islanublar.jurassicworld.com/media/dinosaurs/ankylosaurus/ankylosaurus-info-graphic.png)
