tending dinosaur nerds : if you have n’t already , you ’re going to desire to add Alberta , Canada , to your bucket list , as the provincenow hostsone of the most spectacular dino fossils the world has ever see .
Alberta is well known as home to one of thedensest dinosaur depositson the planet . The Canadian Rockies in general are rich in both fogy and fossil fuels , and the hunt for one has not infrequently led to the other . The in style stunner was unearth in 2011 by workers in a mine nearFort McMurray , who screw something was haywire when their bucket displume up oddly patterned , deep - brown lumps of some unfamiliar mineral . They dug in farther , more carefully , and that ’s when they rule it : a 9 - foot - long chunk of monster , sculpted in Harlan Fisk Stone .
But there had been no statue maker , only time and happenstance . The 2500 - pound stone that eventually emerge was not a skull , or a step , or an egg . It was a petrified dinosaur .
“ We do n’t just have a skeleton , ” Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum , where the dinosaur is on display , toldNational Geographic . “ We have a dinosaur as it would have been . ”
And not just any dinosaur , either . The hulking , armored beast preserved in the oil sands is new to science , the first of its species ever plant . We know that it ’s a type of ankylosaurus called a nodosaur , and that its last days likely took office somewhere between 110 and 112 million years ago .
The recuperate fossil control only the dinosaur ’s front oddment to its hips . In life sentence , the nodosaur would have been 18 feet long and almost 3000 pounds . If that was n’t enough to keep the hater away , it also had a twosome of 20 - in spikes bug out from its shoulders , like a genus Bos . Even in last , this herbivore looks problematic .
Needless to say , dinosaur researchers are beside themselves with glee . The preservation is so in effect , paleobiologist Jakob Vinther of the University of Bristol toldNational Geographic , that “ it might have been walking around a couple of workweek ago . ”
[ h / tNational Geographic ]
