Behold! Turn Thy Trusty Eyes Upon An ACTUAL Dinosaur!

STUNNING DISCOVERY
Some 110 million years ago, this armored plant-eater lumbered through what is now western Canada, until a flooded river swept it into open sea. The dinosaur’s undersea burial preserved its armor in exquisite detail. Its skull still bears tile-like plates and a gray patina of fossilized skins.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK

SHIELDED FROM DECAY
Armored dinosaurs’ trademark plates usually scattered early in decay, a fate that didn’t befall this nodosaur. The remarkably preserved armor will deepen scientists’ understanding of what nodosaurs looked like and how they moved.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK

During its burial at sea, the nodosaur settled onto its back, pressing the dinosaur’s skeleton into the armor and embossing it with the outlines of some bones. One ripple in the armor traces the animal’s right shoulder blade.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK

On the nodosaur’s torso, chocolate-brown ribs lie next to tan osteoderms and dark gray scales. Tendons that once held up the dinosaur’s tail (top) run alongside its spine, preserved as dark brown bands resembling jerky.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK

A lucky break in the nodosaur’s left shoulder spike reveals a cross section of its bony core. The spike’s tip was sheathed in keratin, the same material that’s in human fingernails.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK

Royal Tyrrell Museum technician Mark Mitchell slowly frees the nodosaur’s foot and scaly footpad from the surrounding rock. Mitchell’s careful work will preserve for years to come the animal’s enigmatic features.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK

SOLVING THE PUZZLE
In life this imposing herbivore—called a nodosaur—stretched 18 feet long and weighed nearly 3,000 pounds. Researchers suspect it initially fossilized whole, but when it was found in 2011, only the front half, from the snout to the hips, was intact enough to recover. The specimen is the best fossil of a nodosaur ever found.
COMPOSITE OF EIGHT IMAGES PHOTOGRAPHED AT ROYAL TYRRELL MUSEUM OF PALAEONTOLOGY, DRUMHELLER, ALBERTA (ALL)

A cluster of pebble-like masses may be remnants of the nodosaur’s last meal.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK

MANUEL CANALES, NGM STAFF; PATRICIA HEALY. ART: DAVIDE BONADONNA. SOURCES: CALEB MARSHALL BROWN AND DONALD HENDERSON, ROYAL TYRELL MUSEUM OF PALAEONTOLOGY; JAKOB VINTHER; C. R. SCOTESE, PALEOMAP PROJECT

When I was a little boy I was hell-bent-for-leather on becoming a paleontologist when I grew up. I occasionally think it would have been a good thing. I even wrote a long letter to the legendary Roy Chapman Andrews at the American Museum of Natural History. He was my Hero, see… Unbeknownst to my preteen mind, he had passed a bit before then and the museum staff wrote me a very sweet letter explaining that gently and encouraging my paleontological endeavors. Yeah, maybe I should have done that.

On the afternoon of March 21, 2011, a heavy-equipment operator named Shawn Funk was carving his way through the earth, unaware that he would soon meet a dragon.

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 creature’s immortality hinged on each link in this unlikely chain of events. If it had drifted another few hundred feet on that ancient sea, it would have fossilized beyond Suncor’s property line, keeping it entombed. Instead Funk stumbled upon the oldest Albertan dinosaur ever found, frozen in stone as if it had gazed upon Medusa.

More incredible photos and story at National Geographic

This once in a lifetime thrill took the boffins over 7,000 man-hours of caring, dedicated labor to get this fella out of his rock prison.

Just…Wow.

Peace