Face to face with a perfectly preserved dinosaur that looks like it was alive yesterday

[Spazito]

In March 2011, Shawn Funk, a shovel operator at Suncor Energy’s Millennium oilsands mine north of Fort McMurray, Alta., was digging away at a large bank when he inadvertently stumbled upon Alberta’s oldest dinosaur fossil and one of the most well-preserved dinosaur fossils ever found.

“Right away, we knew it was going to be something good,” says Don Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta. “But we had no idea how good it was going to be.”

After getting the fossil back to the museum, Don and his team set to work solving the 110-million-year-old mystery.

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The approximately five-and-a-half-metre-long specimen was so perfectly preserved that researchers were able to stare into the face of a real dinosaur that lived during a time when North America was a very different place.

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https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/face-to-face-with-a-perfectly-preserved-dinosaur-that-looks-like-it-was-ali