Fossil remains of a duck-billed dinosaur were found in Canada, which stands out from all other findings because it preserved its skin. A rare discovery that promises to shed more light on the development of hadrosaurs.
When it comes to fossil discoveries, they are usually bone remains or even impressions in the terrestrial sediment that no longer retain organic remains. Discoveries of prehistoric animals that still retain their skins are extremely rare and only occur in northern regions where permafrost has managed to preserve organic matter.
But even so, most well-preserved animals found date back to the Upper Paleolithic, such as the woolly mammoths found in Siberia that lived 30,000 years ago. However, dinosaurs date back more than 60 million years, so the gap in the timeline is abysmal, which is why finding dinosaur fossils that have preserved their skin is an extraordinary find.
A hadrosaur that preserves its skin
The discovery was made on the hill in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, a site well known for its fossil discoveries. There, Teri Kaskie, a paleoecologist at the University of Reading, noticed a protrusion on the hillside. Recovery work was immediately initiated, and a buried hadrosaur has now been identified that still has remnants of its skin.
“This is a very exciting discovery, and we hope to complete the excavation in the next two field expeditions. Based on the small size of the tail and foot, it is likely to be a juvenile specimen,” says Brian Pickles, also of the University of Reading.
Hadrosaurs are herbivorous dinosaurs that lived during the Late Cretaceous; they were very abundant about 75 million years ago. They are characterized by having a beak similar to that of ducks, designed for grinding plants. They are bipedal dinosaurs whose size reached 10 meters in the case of adults.
“Although adult duck-billed dinosaurs are well represented in the fossil record, younger animals are much less common. This means the find could help paleontologists understand how hadrosaurs grew and developed,” Pickles explains.
There could be more hidden skin
The specimen found appears to be a juvenile, measuring only 4 meters in length. For now, only part of the fossil is exposed, only the tail and the right leg are visible. In these parts, the skin is intact and the specimen is positioned in such a way as to suggest to the researchers that the other skin is also well preserved.
In that sense, the discovery is extremely exciting for paleontologists seeking to better understand how hadrosaurs developed. “Hadrosaur fossils are relatively common in this part of the world, but another thing that makes this find unique is the fact that large areas of the exposed skeleton are covered in fossilized skin. This suggests that there may be even more skin preserved inside the rock, which may give us more information about what the hadrosaur looked like,” Pickles concludes.
[Photos: University of Reading]
Story originally published in Spanish in Ecoosfera