Beyond the bone: The rare 'dinosaur mummy' uncovered in Alberta

It is said that the Alberta Badlands can be considered an extremely dusty and silent place wherein the land looks more like a time capsule rather than ordinary land. And indeed, it was on such ground in the area known as Dinosaur Provincial Park that a volunteer scout recently uncovered something quite spectacular. On his expedition down a steep incline in the park, he did not merely discover a piece of fossilised bone; he discovered a huge leg and tail sticking out of the hill, complete with its scaly skin.This rare find is believed to belong to a juvenile hadrosaur, a duck-billed herbivore that wandered these plains roughly 75 million years ago. In the high-stakes world of palaeontology, coming across "mummified" skin is the ultimate jackpot. Soft tissues are usually the first thing to vanish after death, rotting away long before a skeleton can even begin the slow process of turning to stone. To see texture on a bone after millions of years is like finding a photograph in a world where everyone only leaves behind footprints.However, the University of Reading, together with the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, has now begun an enormous rescue mission. There is an obvious air of optimism surrounding the site – it is expected that the more scientists dig into the rock wall, the greater the chance of discovering a complete and well-preserved skeleton. It serves as a stark illustration of the fact that the history of our planet may not always be forgotten, only waiting for someone to take a second glance at the hill in question.What causes mummies to persist in the Alberta badlandsFinding a dinosaur skeleton is one thing, but discovering one that still has its scales intact is almost a matter of miracle – scientists have been puzzling over what caused the Canadian badlands to become such a fertile ground for mummies for years on end. The reason was finally revealed, and surprisingly enough, it has everything to do with burial processes occurring during the Late Cretaceous era.A significant study published in the journal PLOS One has changed the way we think about these fossils. For a long time, people assumed a dinosaur had to be buried instantly by a landslide to preserve its skin. However, this research suggests that a carcass could actually sit out for a while. Through a unique process of desiccation, essentially a natural drying out, the skin could harden and become tough enough to survive until it was finally covered by sediment. For this particular young individual, however, this process of mummification has provided a unique opportunity to observe the “middle school years” of dinosaurs. The fact that we usually discover only baby or adult dinosaurs makes the preservation of a youngster important for us to reconstruct the growth and development of those creatures accurately. Each piece of skin we extract from that mountain gives us more information about this extinct creature.A slow race against the elementsExtracting a dinosaur skeleton from the cliffs does not happen fast. Unlike movies suggest, you cannot brush off all that stone in one day. As the hadrosaur is situated on a steep slope, excavators have to be extremely careful, standing on a tiny ledge and hand-chipping the rock around the remains of the skeleton. According to the experts from the University of Reading, the process might take a few summer expeditions.This meticulous pace is a necessity. Fossilised skin is incredibly thin and can crumble if exposed to the air too quickly or handled with too much force. The scientific stakes are incredibly high, as detailed in research published in the journal PeerJ. These types of studies have shown that we can actually see individual scale patterns and microscopic skin layers if the fossil is handled with enough care.Once the bones are free of the badlands, they will move on to a specialised lab where "thousands of hours" of prep work will take place. This is where the technicians will clean any remaining stone from the fossilised scales. If the skin runs across the rest of the hadrosaur's body as expected, then this will be considered to be one of the most important finds in North America's history. To the volunteer who discovered the hadrosaur's tail protruding from the dirt, this discovery was made not just once but twice in their lifetime.