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Young World
Dino Mummy
Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of a dinosaur that has much of its soft tissue still intact. Skin, muscle, tendons and other tissue that rarely survive fossilisation have all been preserved in the specimen unearthed in North Dakota, U.S. The 67 million-year-old dinosaur is one of the duck-billed hadrosaur group. The preservation allowed scientists to estimate that it was more muscular than thought, perhaps giving it the ability to outrun predators like T. rex. Wh
ile it has been dubbed a dinosaur “mummy”, the dinosaur is actually fossilised into stone. “It’s unbelievable when you look at it for the first time,” said palaeontologist Phillip Manning from the University of Manchester, U.K. Because it has been fossilised researchers do not know the colour of the skin. But looking at it in monochrome shows a striped pattern. The fossil is nicknamed Dakota. Researchers hope the technology will help them learn more about the fossilised insides of the creature.
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