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The world's best-preserved nodosaur stirred wide interest when it went on display at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Canada in May 2017.
Its skin scales, fearsome shoulder spikes, and possibly even skin colors prompted fossil pigment expert Jakob Vinther to tell National Geographic that it "might have been walking around a couple of weeks ago. I've never seen anything like this."1 New details published in
Current Biology back up that statement.
2Apparently, this specimen is different enough from other nodosaurs to warrant its own genus and species name:
Borealopelta markmitchelli. It had secondary organic molecular structures called kerogen that form when primary proteins break down and mix underground.
In a May 12 interview,
Issues, Etc. radio host Todd Wilken asked me about this fossil, "So it's very possible here that we're not looking at a fossil, strictly speaking-not a stone cast of what was once there as living matter-but a mummified specimen of a dinosaur?" I replied, "It's possible, but there haven't been any technical reports out yet."
3Well, now a technical report is out, and it shows not quite as pristine a preservation as an Egyptian mummy, but it reveals nodosaur skin scales with kerogen's energy-packed chemical bonds still intact.
4 Though lab studies have not yet measured the expected shelf life for kerogen, this specimen still contains organic chemistry fragile enough to challenge the fossil's vast age assignments. Microbes feed on kerogens, but even with no microbes in sight, kerogens still have plenty of potential chemical energy that inevitably reacts with other chemicals in an incessant chemical breakdown. Though they may be tough, kerogens cannot last forever-and should not last anywhere close to the 112 to 125 million years assigned to this fossil.
