Nicoletta Lanese is a staff writer for Live Science covering health and medicine, along with an assortment of biology, animal, environment and climate stories. She holds degrees in neuroscience and dance from the University of Florida and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in The Scientist Magazine, Science News, The San Jose Mercury News and Mongabay, among other outlets.
Around 67 million years ago in what is now North Dakota, a duck-billed dinosaur keeled over and died, and crocodiles' ancient relatives descended on the carcass, tearing holes through the skin and marking up the bones. Today, evidence of the predators' feast can still be seen in the dino's fossilized remains, which include remarkable"mummified" skin.
Now, Drumheller and her colleagues have identified another means of making dinosaur mummies — no rapid burial required. Instead, these mummies may have been buried weeks or months postmortem, after all sorts of scavengers, from crocodilians to microbes, had nibbled at their bodies. And by snacking on the corpses, scavengers may have helped ready them for fossilization.
Drumheller and her colleagues drew these conclusions by examining a well-known Edmontosaurus fossil housed at the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum in Bismarck. The specimen, nicknamed"Dakota," was discovered in 1999 on a ranch near Marmarth, in southwestern North Dakota. Specifically, it was excavated from the Hell Creek Formation, a fossil-packed geological formation that took shape near the end of the Cretaceous period and the start of the Paleogene period .
Dakota's glittering skin went on public display at the Heritage Center starting in 2014, although at that time, the fossil had not been completely freed of the rock surrounding it. In 2018, fossil preparators set about cleaning the specimen more thoroughly, and in that process, they uncovered markings that looked suspiciously like bite marks.
At that point, the carcass would have donned a"deflated appearance, with skin and associated dermal structures draped closely over the underlying bone," according to the study. The deflated dino would then have been buried and fully fossilized at a later date, and would end up looking like the mummified Dakota specimen as it appears today.
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