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Scientists Found a Dinosaur's Face, Complete With Its Skin - msnNOW
Jan 26, 2023 1 min, 0 secs
In 2011, archaeologists uncovered one of the most — if not the most — pristine dinosaur fossils yet: a near-whole ankylosaur, complete with its jagged spikes, most of its limbs, armor coating, and some of its guts and stomach contents.

It took Mark Mitchell, a technician at Royal Tyrell Museum, an absurd 7,000 hours and nearly six years to meticulously exhume the fossil by delicately chipping away at the surrounding stone.

"During preparation, I would piece together the blocks like a puzzle, and the animal started to really take shape," Mitchell said in a new interview with Ars Technica, describing the painstaking process.

One such study led by Caleb Brown, a curator at Royal Tyrell, examined the bone structure known as osteoderms found on ankylosaurs, which in less freakishly preserved specimens, usually fall out of place.

Another study on the specimen led by Brown and his colleagues posits that the Boreapelta used a form of camouflage known as countershading, which heretofore hasn't been observed in creatures of its size, i.e. big ones.

As Ars notes, the fact that such a formidably armored dinosaur also had to employ camouflage to survive may imply that the Cretaceous period was even more cutthroat than once thought.

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