By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer |
May 16, 2017 10:22am ET
A spiky, tank-like dinosaur
discovered in a Canadian mine is so well-preserved, it looks as if the
fossilized creature were frozen in time for 110 million years.
Miners discovered the
18-foot-long (5.5 meters) beast — a nodosaur, a cousin of ankylosaurs,
which also had body armor but didn't sport club tails — in 2011 during routine
work at the Suncor Millennium Mine in Alberta.
Shawn Funk, a heavy-equipment
operator, noticed the fossil because the texture and color looked different
than the surrounding rock, according
to National Geographic, which broke the story on Friday (May 12). Soon
after, the Suncor Energy company contacted the Royal Tyrrell Museum of
Palaeontology in Alberta, where the specimen has remained for the past six
years, painstakingly being chiseled out, one inch at a time.
"It was a very slow reveal,
but it was a very exciting one nonetheless," said Caleb Brown, a
postdoctoral fellow at the museum, and a co-author of a study describing the
new species, which he expects to be published in a peer-reviewed journal this
summer.
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