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upstart writes:

Washed out to sea, a giant beast and its armored skin were left in pristine condition:

Borealopelta mitchelli found its way back into the sunlight in 2017, millions of years after it had died. This armored dinosaur is so magnificently preserved that we can see what it looked like in life. Almost the entire animal—the skin, the armor that coats its skin, the spikes along its side, most of its body and feet, even its face—survived fossilization. It is, according to Dr. Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, a one-in-a-billion find.

Beyond its remarkable preservation, this dinosaur is an important key to understanding aspects of Early Cretaceous ecology, and it shows how this species may have lived within its environment. Since its remains were discovered, scientists have studied its anatomy, its armor, and even what it ate in its last days, uncovering new and unexpected insight into an animal that went extinct approximately 100 million years ago.

Borealopelta is a nodosaur, a type of four-legged ankylosaur with a straight tail rather than a tail club. Its finding in 2011 in an ancient marine environment was a surprise, as the animal was terrestrial.

[...] One of the reasons this fossil was so well-preserved is because it was covered in a very thick, very hard concretion—a solid mass that sometimes forms around fossils. The concretion maintained the fossil in 3D, unlike the typically 2D-flattened fossils that occur after millions of years of pressure from overlying rock. Henderson said the concretion helped preserve the skin, preventing even bacteria from breaking it down.

It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours. The length of time it took and the quality of his work are why this dinosaur was named after him (he's the "Mitchell" in the Borealopelta markmitchelli).

[...] Few people can claim to be the first to see the actual face of an extinct animal with no modern analogs. Mitchell described that experience as "absolutely amazing. This was the first dinosaur I've worked on with skin actually covering the skull, so being able to see what this animal looked like when it was alive was really cool."

But he was also "amazed at the skin impressions on the bottom (pad) of the foot. These matched the patterns seen in footprints left behind by other ankylosaurs preserved in Alberta [and British Columbia]."

[...] "The specimen is impressive in its own right, even without any of the research," Brown wrote. "The combination of preserved soft tissues and retained 3D shape results in the animal looking much like it did back in the Cretaceous... I think ongoing and future research, specifically looking at features such as the preserved skin and stomach contents will continue to add to our understanding of this animal."

A really cool picture of the dinosaur head from the article.

Original Submission