Scientists are celebrating after the discovery of what could be the best-preserved armored dinosaur type specimen ever found. Known as nodosaur, it’s around 110 million-year-old.

Back in 2011, a heavy equipment operator by the name of Shawn Funk, who works for energy company Suncor in Alberta, was drilling crude oil sands when he suddenly discovered brown rocks that looked like ribs. “It was nothing we had ever seen before,” said Funk in a 2011 interview. The man didn’t yet know that he had just discovered a dinosaur fossil.

Nearly six years later, one can finally see the cool dinosaur at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Scientists say a significant amount of the real dinosaur fossil’s ‘skin’ and “armor, complete from the snout to hips” was intact.

“We don’t just have some dinosaur bones,” Caleb Brown, a researcher at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, told National Geographic. “We have a dinosaur as it would have been.” The dinosaur is so well preserved as it “may have been swept away by a flooded river and carried out to sea, where it eventually sank. Over millions of years on the ocean floor, minerals took the place of the dinosaur’s armor and skin, preserving ancient history in the lifelike form now on display.”

More info: Royal Tyrrell Museum | Facebook | Instagram (h/t: nationalgeographic)

Scientists are celebrating after the discovery of what could possibly be the best-preserved armoured dinosaur specimen ever found

Known as nodosaur, it’s around 110 million-year-old

It was discovered back in 2011 by a Canadian heavy equipment operator when drilling for crude oil

“We don’t just have a skeleton… We have a dinosaur as it would have been”

It “may have been swept away by a flooded river and carried out to sea, where it eventually sank” to be so incredibly well preserved

This is a replica of how nodosaurs must have looked

Image credits: Herschel Hoffmeyer

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