Astonishing dinosaur mummy has 'glittering' skin that was punctured and ripped by ancient crocs

Around 67 million years ago in what is now North Dakota, a duck-billed dinosaur died and crocodiles descended on it to mark up the bones. Evidence of the predator's feast can still be seen in the dinosaur's bones.

The bite marks may help explain how the dinosaur became a mummy. Dinosaur mummies with well-preserved skin and soft tissues may be more common than previously thought.

The assumption used to be that if you wanted to get a mummy, you had to be buried quickly. The remains of a dinosaur would be protected from the elements and scavengers if the body was covered in some kind of geological material. The animal's skin could be mummified.

Drumheller and her colleagues have found a new way to make dinosaur mummies. These mummies might have been buried weeks or months postmortem, after all sorts of scavengers had eaten their bodies. scavengers snack on corpses to prepare them for fossilization.

There are lizards that look like roadkill.

"If you have a predator partially eating the remains, that can help the long-term stabilization of things like skin, when those secondary chemical changes can happen," Drumheller said.

A well-known Edmontosaurus fossil was examined by Drumheller and her colleagues. The specimen was found on a ranch in southwest North Dakota. It was excavated from the Hell Creek Formation, a geological formation that formed at the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Paleogene period.

The Edmontosaurus fossil is missing its head and the tip of its tail, but the rest of the animal's bones are still intact. There are large swaths of preserved skin covering the bones of the dinosaur.

The skin is a deep brown, almost brownish black, and it has a bit of a shine to it because it has so much iron in it. She said it almost looked like it was shiny.

The fossil of Dakota was not completely freed of the rock surrounding it when it went on public display. Fossil preparators discovered markings that looked like bite marks when they cleaned the specimen more thoroughly in 2019. There were bite marks on the specimen's tail and Householder found more on the right fore limb.

When the team started looking for bite marks on Dakota's bones, they found distinct marks on his bones. It's difficult to find bite marks inskin. The skin stretches and tears as it is bitten into, and the decomposition process warps the tissue further. To find out what bite marks on dinosaur skin would look like, the team looked to forensic studies.

It's not a perfect comparison because dinosaur skin is more durable than human skin.

Dakota's tail may have been made by teeth or claws, according to the researchers. It's possible that a dinosaur, such as a large deinonychosaur, may have left marks on the ground. The team found more than a dozen puncture wounds on Dakota's right hand and fore limb and noted that the skin of the latter had been partially peeled back.

There is a best-preserved dinosaur stomach.

If Dakota's carcass remained unburied and vulnerable to scavengers for some time after he died, how did it mummify? The researchers used forensic literature again. They learned about a mode of decomposition that may apply to Dakota.

The dinosaur carcass could have remained unburied for weeks or even months as animals, insects and microbes tore holes through the skin and ate away at the animal's internal organs. The holes in the skin would have allowed gasses and fluids from the dinosaur's corpse to escape and cause the skin to dry out.

According to the study, the carcass would have had a "deflated appearance with skin and associated structures draped closely over the underlying bone." The deflated dino would have been buried and fossilized at a later date, and would look like the Dakota specimen it is today.

In the forensic literature, this is something that is fairly predictable. It wasn't something that had been looked at in the context of dinosaur mummies.

It is reasonable to think that most of the dinosaur mummies are formed through desiccation and deflation. The team wrote in the study that some dinosaurs may have formed through being submerged in water with little oxygen present. The lack of oxygen in the deep water slows the decomposition process, which leads to mummification, a process that has been documented in swamp-preserved remains of Medieval humans.

The researchers are confident that they know what happened to Dakota after he died, but they don't know what happened after he was buried. To analyze more dinosaur mummies that formed in the same way Dakota did, the team wants to study which chemical reactions allow dinosaur skin to fossilize.

Dakota's left foot and tail can be seen at the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum. The rest of the specimen is being looked at. Fossil preparators have spent over 15,000 hours on Dakota so far, and they expect to spend thousands more with the mummy before they finish their work.